B.P. Introduces Low-Salt Water to Enhance Oil Extraction, as part of Shetlands oil-boom.

As part of an anticipated massive oil boom in the Sheltlands, along with a revamping of the Sullam Voe terminal (confirmed just last week), B.P. intends to use a desalination plant to reduce the salt content of seawater so that it can more effectively flush oil from the surfaces of the rock reservoirs that contain it. http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9044064&contentId=7077181 If the process can increase the amount of oil recovered by another 4%, from a current average of 35%, this will mean a substantial increase in output across the industry. Applied to the Clair Ridge field, which is in the North Sea off the western Sheltand islands, it is thought that, over the lifetime of the well, 640 million barrels of crude oil might be recovered using untreated sea water, but that 42 million barrels, over and above this, could be made available using the low-salt water. The cost of the desalination plant is $120 million, which will add $3 to the cost of a barrel of oil.

Crude oil contains a wide range of molecules, many of which are charged or polar. In the B.P. research laboratories at Sunbury on Thames, in the south of England, it has been discovered that the oil molecules form chemical bridges with doubly charged cations, such as Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ that are present on the surfaces of clay particles in sandstone. At the normal salt concentrations in seawater (3,500 ppm), the oil molecules are compressed close to the mineral surface, so preventing access by free cations that are necessary to displace the Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ cations and thus free the oil from the surface. As the salt concentration is reduced, the thickness of the thin film of water between the oil molecules and the surface increases, through an effect known as “expansion of the electrical double layer”, and permits access of free cations from the seawater. This releases the oil molecules from the rock surface.

For the method to work, two criteria must pertain: (1) the total salinity of the water must be low enough to relax the electrical double layer compression, and (2) the dipositive cation concentration needs to be lower than that of the reservoir water. Together, these factors allow most of the oil to be released that is bound to the reservoir surface by this mechanism. B.P. uses water flooding to recover 60% of its oil, and it is predicted that the low-salt (LoSal®) method might increase production over the company’s holdings by 700 million barrels.

This latest development is part of a predicted new oil boom in the Shetland Sullom Voe oil terminal, for which £300 million ($480 million) worth of investment is expected.The manager of the terminal  confirmed only last week that the following projects were going ahead:
● a complete refurbishment of the plant and pipework.
● introduction of a major gas-cleaning plant.
● construction of a temporary two-storey office building at Sella Ness.
● final work on the Project Aurora gas plant.
● overhaul, by its owners, Fortum, of the power station.
● overhaul of 16 giant oil storage tanks.

While only 9.2 million tonnes of oil were produced by the terminal last year, over its lifetime it has handled one-third of the British offshore oil production. The Clair Ridge development (where the desalinised water is to be employed) is expected to be a major producer, with two new platforms. Oil will be brought through the existing pipe to Sullom Voe from the end of 2016, which could continue for another 25 years, still being in operation in the 2040s.

Rebuilding the Soil Food Web – A Perfect, Natural Recycling System.

I found an interesting video-clip recently which I now summarise the contents of: http://permaculturenews.org/2012/09/27/grow-gigantic-vegetables-by-harnessing-the-soil-food-web/ This gives a very clear description of the soil food web, and the need to restore it, to make soil more active, rather than relying on an industrialized agricultural system, that is utterly dependent on vast inputs of limited resources: petroleum-refined fuels, and fertilizers made from natural gas and mined rock phosphate.

Californian humus is formed by low-temperature decomposition of wood chips over 3-5 years. Most composting processes work at higher temperatures which destroy the soil microorganisms. Soil humus is the component of soil that has been broken down by microbes to form soil organic matter (SOM). Leaves fall and form litter on the surface of the soil. These are broken down by fungi, which have evolved for the purpose of breaking it down to soil humus. Humus can be thought of as an ecosystem which contains many thousands of different types of microorganisms growing together and working in symbiosis with plants to build topsoil. The application of chemicals and tillage has killed-off microbes and destroyed soil biodiversity. In conventional (industrialized) agriculture - noting that this has only been in existence for about 60 years! - soil humus is lacking, and so plants have no microbes growing with them and no immunity. This leads to problems of disease, pests etc. Better results (yields) are obtained using organic methods to rebuild soil humus.

 The Soil Food Web is a whole community of microorganisms that live in soil, of which there are four main types: bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes, whose collective numbers total billions in a single teaspoonful of soil. The soil food web shows how they all relate to one another. In nature, plants grow and then eventually die, leaving dead material lying on the surface of the soil. At the vanguard are bacteria and fungi, which eat the plant material, and hence all the nutrients that were in the plants now become incorporated into the bodies of the bacteria and fungi. To make these nutrients available to plants again, requires the action of the soil predators - like sharks in the ocean or wolves in the pasture setting – nematodes and protozoa. These eat the bacteria and fungi continually, and excrete the nutrients in forms that can once more be used by plants. A perennial process is thus sustained: plants grow and die, bacteria and fungi consume the plant material, and are themselves eaten by predators which convert them to (and excrete them as) available nutrients that are taken up again, by newly growing plants.

 e.g. In the case of nitrogen, plant mass is eaten by bacteria and the N becomes part of the bacterial biomass. The bacteria are eaten by protozoa, which excrete the N in plant-available (NH₄⁺) form. This can reduce the necessary input of N-fertilizer by 50% because the microbes help convert the plant material to useful fertilizer. About half way through the video is some wonderful footage, recorded at 400x magnification, of a bacteria-feeding nematode actually eating a bacterium, as part of its daily diet of some 50,000 bacteria. As it eats each bacterium, it excretes plant-available N. California humus is used to form a “tea”, by extracting the humus into water, which can be applied to crops to inoculate the soil food web, eventually meaning that very low inputs of artificial fertilizers are required to grow crops, and an improved resistance to disease is achieved.

The Bunker Mentality.

One hundred feet below the Essex countryside lies the Secret Nuclear Bunker at Kelvdon Hatch, intended to house up to 600 military and civilian personnel - which may have included the Prime Minister - for 3 months, to coordinate the surviving population of London and its environs in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The bunker, in its entirety, is encased by a 10 foot thick wall, created by pouring continually some 40,000 tonnes of concrete, over a period of 7 months in 1951/52. Working through the winter, the installation was kept warm by burning fires around it so that the concrete could set properly. The entrance to the bunker is concealed behind a very ordinary looking bungalow, and leads to a corridor 120 yards long, running into a hill. The corridor is truncated by a left, right-angle bend, intended that in the event of a nuclear blast, much of its energy would be dissipated before it could enter the main body of the bunker, which is closed-off by a pair of two-inch thick armoured-doors, each a tonne and a half in weight. A universal Faraday cage was installed to protect any electronic devices within the bunker from being taken-out by the high-energy electromagnetic pulse that always accompanies a nuclear detonation.

A supply of 24,000 gallons of water was preserved in underground tanks, along with enough food to feed 600 people for three months. At a daily dietary intake of 2,400 “calories” (kilocalories), a human body produces around 117 Watts of heat, and so, at full capacity, 70 kW of heat would need to be dissipated, for which an extensive cooling system was emplaced. The air supply into the bunker was drawn from the outside through a primary and secondary filtration system, and traces of dust not thus intercepted, were removed by a fine spray of water to avoid introducing any radioactive contamination. A facility was also installed with sufficient power that, in case of fire or other source of toxic release, all the air from the bunker could be extracted within 10 minutes. Since the whole is, in effect, a rather voluminous three-storey building, I imagine that to have been in there during such an operation would have been quite an experience.

Once the blast doors had been closed, that was it for the next 3 months. Some of the personnel were armed, and so anyone getting cabin fever and trying to escape would have been shot immediately, so as not to breach the security of the rest. The sanitation arrangements were interesting, since once the tanks from the latrines were full, the pumps would come into play, automatically discharging their contents to the surface in a powerful jet, possibly adding to the discomfort of anyone still surviving and unfortunate enough to get in the way of it!

In the anticipation that medical attention would be needed among the 600 throng, there was a sickbay, including a basic operating theatre, on the second floor, and also a supply of cardboard coffins, which stack flat. After about 3 days, a corpse begins to balloon with the gases of its incipient decomposition, and so the dead would be returned to the outside fairly rapidly. Since the living need sleep, there were dormitories – with the “hot bed” system intended – so that as one person went on shift, another would take his place in the warm bed, although with no lights on, this would be a noisy procedure and probably very little rest would be had by anybody.

The bunker is no longer “secret”, and is quite well signposted. It was decommissioned in 1992, and is now privately owned as a tourist attraction. Though never used for its purpose, the bunker was inaugurated entirely during the “cold war” period - such was Western fear of an all-out nuclear attack from “The Russians” - and is not a relic from WWII. Altogether, there were 12 bunkers of this kind built across the country, and connected by telephone cables set deep into the ground, so that communication could be maintained, even while the civilian population was being reduced by radiation sickness, starvation and marauding gangs, beyond those already killed instantly by the nuclear explosions.

There are many parallels that might be drawn between the mentality of the bunker, in anticipation of a nuclear attack by a foreign power, and the survival of humanity in the face of peak oil and ultimately climate change. Will a select few try to hide behind barriers, while the rest tear each other apart, fighting for what resources are left? In reality, there would have been nothing left for those in the nuclear bunker to come out to. The crops of the first year would have been destroyed by extreme cold and in the second year, there would have been little growth beneath the dust-filled skies of this nuclear winter. Much of the population would have been dead, and the land and infrastructure inhospitable to start anew. In reality, those “protected” few would have been condemned along with the huddled masses they sheltered from, once their carefully squirrelled resources had run dry. The only course for humankind is to create a stable set of conditions, which such catastrophes cannot be part of; where our immediate security is not vulnerable to disruptions in exogenous global supply chains or threats from external forces. We, all of us, stand or fall together in the unfolding future - a choice of implementing the structures of local resilience over those of global dependency.The threat to human civilization is no longer of an external kind, but lies in our actions and behaviour - we cannot hide from ourselves.

Plastics Without Oil.

Crude oil provides the principal source of carbon for the whole of the chemical industry, to fabricate products ranging from plastics to pharmaceuticals. However, oil is a finite resource, and predictions from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) are that the world supply of crude oil may begin to fail demand for it within a year, which is in accord with studies from both the U.S. and German military. p-Xylene is a raw feedstock for the polyester industry, and is produced by catalytic reforming of petroleum naphtha. p-Xylene is oxidized to form terephthalic acid, which by condensation with ethylene glycol forms polyethylene terephthalate, of which some 5 million tonnes annually is manufactured. A process is under development for making polyesters which is independent of crude oil, since it uses ethylene as its feedstock. First, a trimer molecule, containing 6 carbon atoms, is formed from ethylene. Following dehydrogenation, this material undergoes a Diels–Alder reaction with an additional ethylene molecule to form 3,6-dimethylcyclohexene. By dehydrogenation of the latter material, using a platinum catalyst supported on alumina, a good yield of p-xylene is obtained, with minimal side-products, so obviating the need for complex, energy-intensive separation processes. In contrast to cracking light hydrocarbons from oil at high temperatures to form ethylene, it might instead be generated from biomass, and thus this development might be perceived as a first step on the path to the extrication of an industry from its utter dependency on crude oil. In the medium term, ethylene can be made from Natural Gas Plant Liquids, or even shale gas.

http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/2681801/Restructuring_the_Chemical_Industry_One_Reaction_at_a_Time.html

Soil and Phosphorus.

I have just submitted the following letter to RSC News, which is published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Sir:

The quality of soil cannot be over-emphasised, as was alluded to in the September issue of RSC News, and indeed pointed-out in 1937 by the then U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a letter to State Governors saying that: “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself," urging uniform soil conservation laws. Roosavelt was aware too of the importance of phosphorus in soil, though the agriculture in the U.S. was far less dependent on rock phosphate as a fertilizer, and indeed the rest of the world, than is the case now. According to some estimates, the production of rock phosphate will peak around the year 2030, with potentially catastrophic consequences for world food production in the subsequent years. A wholesale conservation of phosphorus is necessary, including from human and animal waste, to allay this situation, and methods of regenerative agriculture and permaculture should be researched and developed which both reduce inputs of synthetic and mined fertilizers, and rebuild the organic component of soil, including its mycorrhizal fungi, which act symbiotically with the roots of plants, and provide nutrients (including phosphate) to the plants in exchange for carbohydrate delivered from the plant as formed by photosynthesis. As a rider to this, the excessive application of phosphate fertilizer discourages the growth of the fungi, and renders agriculture yet further dependent on artificial inputs of phosphorus, in a pseudo-addictive fashion. It has been stated that, if done over the world's 15 million square kilometers of arable land, some 40% of anthropogenic carbon emissions might be sequestered in soil through the implementation of regenerative practices.

Regards,

Chris Rhodes