Author: Neville

Gas2Grid Records High Levels of Methane in Exploration Well Onshore Cebu
by Quintella Koh
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Rigzone Staff
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Monday, December 24, 2012
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Australia’s Gas2Grid disclosed in a statement Monday that it has recorded very high methane levels at its Gumamela-1 exploration well at a depth of 1,824 feet (556 meters).

The company stated that it will continue drilling the well – sited onshore Cebu Island, in the Philippines – to 2,461 feet (750 meters). Once reaching this depth, it will acquire a suite of open-hole electric logs before setting in a seven inch casing.

Following in which, the well will be drilled to a total depth of between 3,281 feet and 4,265 feet (1,000 meters and 1,300 meters) to test a Miocene age Cebu limestone pinnacle reef, along with secondary targets in the overlying draped sandstone reservoirs of the Malubog and Toledo formations.

The well targets up to 15 million barrels of recoverable oil, and is the second well being drilled in Gas2Grid’s current three-well exploration program.

Gas2Grid said in an earlier statement Dec.17 that Gumamela-1 has good prospects for the sandstone reservoirs that will likely be present in the section overlying the limestone reef target; the same sandstones which are oil and gas bearing in the nearby Toledo and Alegria oil fields.

Quintella has reported on the upstream and downstream oil and petrochemicals markets from 2004. Email Quintella at quintella.koh@rigzone.com.

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Quintella Koh
Asian Editor

It’s time to cut the obscene amount of Christmas food waste

Britons throw out the equivalent of 2m turkeys, 5m Christmas puddings and 74m mince pies, figures show
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A total Christmas food bill averages £169 per household and over a third (35%) of us admit to throwing away more food at Christmas than at any other time of year. Photograph: Alamy

Whether it is because we are suckers for gluttony or incapable of calculating how much we will need to feed our family and friends for the annual Christmas feast, every year British household shamelessly end up chucking away a mountain of surplus festive food. We shop, we eat some of it and bin the rest. Much of it could be re-used and such enormous waste is drain on the environment as well as our finances.

Figures published on Thursday reveal the shocking extent of our thoughtlessness. We throw out the equivalent of 2 million turkeys, 5m Christmas puddings and a truly shocking 74m mince pies, according to the Love Food Hate Waste campaign run by the government’s waste reduction advisory body, Wrap. To put it into context, that means we are binning nearly twice as many mince pies as retail giant Marks & Spencer sells every year (40m).

With a total Christmas food bill averaging a huge £169 per household and over a third (35%) of us admitting to throwing away more food at Christmas than at any other time of year, Love Food Hate Waste has partnered with Unilever to help 12 families across the UK to cut down on their food waste in the run up to and over Christmas. The families are aiming to slash the amount of food they throw away by a quarter and cut their grocery bills by 15%.

The partnership’s 12 top tips aim to help people make the most of leftovers and store food cleverly in the run up to Christmas. Some are straight from the ministry of the blindingly obvious, such as freezing leftover cheese or using cooked sprouts to make bubble and squeak. Genius. Some recipes feature Flora spread and Hellman’s mayonnaise (Unilever, ahem, make both).

But isn’t it time that we cut the obscene amount of food waste which has become a fixture of this time of year, planning our shopping and cooking more carefully? Let’s face it, many supermarkets will re-open on Boxing Day and we are hardly going to suffer if we don’t have enough mince pies.

Social pressures and glossy TV advertisements from supermarkets mean that often we feel we have no choice but to be over-generous and put on a massive spread that we know we are not going to eat.

Kathy Cope, a 39-year-old mother of two who lives in Woolton Village, Liverpool, is taking part in the challenge. She says, “Christmas is definitely the most wasteful time of year for us. I overbuy because I want everything to be perfect. It’s hard to get portions right and I don’t want to appear stingy so I always cook far more than I need to.”

And if your guilt buttons were not already firmly pressed, it’s not just leftover turkey scraps you need to be worrying about. Britons will apparently pour 15 million cups of roast turkey fat down the kitchen sink on Christmas Day, enough to nearly fill an Olympic swimming pool.

New research from the University of Portsmouth has shed light on what happens to this fat once it enters sewers and transforms into a hard, soapy material. Scientists estimate removing fat, oil and grease from sewer pipes adds up to £50m a year to our household bills. Yuck.

Activist calls bluff on gas seam companies as conviction wiped

Date December 24, 2012 Read later

Paddy Manning

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Conviction overturned … Drew Hutton, right. Photo: Damian White

A QUEENSLAND judge has overturned the conviction of Drew Hutton, co-founder of the Greens and president of the anti-coal seam gas group Lock the Gate.

Mr Hutton, pictured, was arrested on March 29 last year while protesting on QGC’s gas fields near Tara on Queensland’s western Darling Downs.

Last December Mr Hutton was convicted in the Dalby Magistrates Court under section 805 of Queensland’s Petroleum and Gas Act, which provides for fines of up to $50,000 against anyone who obstructs an oil and gas company from entering, crossing or carrying out any other authorised activity on land covered by an exploration or production licence, on condition that they have been properly warned by the company.

But District Court judge Fleur Kingham acquitted Mr Hutton – the only person so far to have been convicted under the law – on the basis that he was not properly warned by QGC. Her judgment criticised the ”awkward and ambiguous drafting of s805”.

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Mr Hutton said it would be a ”brave or foolish policeman” who arrested anyone under the Queensland law.

”It’s been the main bluff the government and companies have been using against landowners from day one. The other one is that landowners would be taken to court.

”We’ve called [their bluff],” he said.”This makes it a lot easier for people to lock the gate.”

Mr Hutton, a long-time environment campaigner who has been arrested while protesting before, spent a night in Toowoomba jail last year after being arrested at Tara, after he refused to sign a bail agreement that required him to avoid QGC sites.

Mr Hutton’s appeal was funded by Kjerulf Ainsworth, son of billionaire poker machine king Len Ainsworth, who has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Lock the Gate.

Neither QGC nor oil and gas lobby group the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association was available for comment.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/activist-calls-bluff-on-gas-seam-companies-as-conviction-wiped-20121223-2btkp.html#ixzz2Fxk5EUbr

West Antarctica warming fast, may quicken sea level rise-study

By ALISTER DOYLE, REUTERS December 24, 2012 2:15am

133 17 0 159

OSLO – West Antarctica is warming almost twice as fast as previously believed, adding to worries of a thaw that would add to sea level rise from San Francisco to Shanghai, a study showed on Sunday.

Annual average temperatures at the Byrd research station in West Antarctica had risen 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3F) since the 1950s, one of the fastest gains on the planet and three times the global average in a changing climate, it said.

The unexpectedly big increase adds to fears the ice sheet is vulnerable to thawing. West Antarctica holds enough ice to raise world sea levels by at least 3.3 meters (11 feet) if it ever all melted, a process that would take centuries.

“The western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought,” Ohio State University said in a statement of the study led by its geography professor David Bromwich.

The warming “raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise,” it said. Higher summer temperatures raised risks of a surface melt of ice and snow even though most of Antarctica is in a year-round deep freeze.

Low-lying nations from Bangladesh to Tuvalu are especially vulnerable to sea level rise, as are coastal cities from London to Buenos Aires. Sea levels have risen by about 20 cms (8 inches) in the past century.

The United Nations panel of climate experts projects that sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-24 inches) this century, and by more if a thaw of Greenland and Antarctica accelerates, due to global warming caused by human activities.

Glaciers

The rise in temperatures in the remote region was comparable to that on the Antarctic Peninsula to the north, which snakes up towards South America, according to the U.S.-based experts writing in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Parts of the northern hemisphere have also warmed at similarly fast rates.

Several ice shelves – thick ice floating on the ocean and linked to land – have collapsed around the Antarctic Peninsula in recent years. Once ice shelves break up, glaciers pent up behind them can slide faster into the sea, raising water levels.

“The stakes would be much higher if a similar event occurred to an ice shelf restraining one of the enormous West Antarctic ice sheet glaciers,” said Andrew Monaghan, a co-author at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The Pine Island glacier off West Antarctica, for instance, brings as much water to the ocean as the Rhine river in Europe.

The scientists said there had been one instance of a widespread surface melt of West Antarctica, in 2005. “A continued rise in summer temperatures could lead to more frequent and extensive episodes of surface melting,” they wrote.

West Antarctica now contributes about 0.3 mm a year to sea level rise, less than Greenland’s 0.7 mm, Ohio State University said. The bigger East Antarctic ice sheet is less vulnerable to a thaw.

Helped by computer simulations, the scientists reconstructed a record of temperatures stretching back to 1958 at Byrd, where about a third of the measurements were missing, sometimes because of power failures in the long Antarctic winters. — Reuters

Methane could be used to make ethylene, a precursor of polymers, fuels, surfactants and detergents

21/12/2012

Sulphur offers path to chemicals from methane

Could lead to greater exploitation of cheap shale

Helen Tunnicliffe

CATALYSTS based on sulphur could be used to convert methane in natural gas into ethylene, a precursor of many important chemicals, according to US-based chemical engineers.

In the US, shale gas is providing a cheap and readily available source of methane, so finding easy ways of converting it into ethylene, used to make polymers, fuels, surfactants, detergents, and textiles, amongst others, could offer a new source of revenue to chemicals companies. Methane usually requires very high temperatures to activate its chemical bonds and react it, and there have been many attempts to find catalysts to make this process easier. Matthew Neurock, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, thinks that using elemental sulphur and sulphide catalysts could provide the answer.

Neurock and colleagues at Northwestern University used quantum mechanical calculations to prove the theory of their idea, and laboratory experiments to prove the practical aspects.

Previous experiments had attempted to use oxygen as a catalyst, but found that oxygen is too reactive, producing carbon dioxide rather than ethylene. The sulphur reacts with the hydrogen, removing it from the methane. The resulting hydrocarbon fragments can then react on the sulphide catalyst, forming longer chain hydrocarbons, like ethylene. The researchers believe that sulphur has a lower affinity for the hydrogen, which prevents over-reaction. A high methane:sulphur ratio and the availability of a support increases the selectivity to produce ethylene.

“The abundance of natural gas, along with the development of new methods to extract it from hidden reserves, offers unique opportunities for the development of catalytic processes that can convert methane to chemicals,” says Neurock. “Our finding – of using sulphur to catalyse the conversion of methane to ethylene – shows initial promise for the development of new catalytic processes that can potentially take full advantage of these reserves. The research, however, is really just in its infancy.”

Nature Chemistry DOI: 10.1038/nchem.1527