Petroscan august 2015

www.petrotechsociety.org

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Points To Ponder • Will the greenhouse gas emission cuts being pledged by the world’s nations will fall short of restricting global warming to 2°C? • A rise beyond 2°C, the internationally agreed safety limit, may push the climate beyond tipping points and into dangerous instability.

• The expected pledges are likely to limit temperature rises to about 3°C. • Is 3°C acceptable?

• No

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CONTENTS OIL, GAS & ENERGY : NEWS & VIEWS

Editorial Note

Editor’s Choice • Hurricane Katrina 10 years later: What energy companies can learn from firms that weathered the storm • Halliburton and Baker Hughes merger: Efficiency alone is not enough, case study shows

Editor's Pick • IEA sees 2015 demand growth at five-year high of 1.6 million b/d • Fracking Chemicals and Human Development • Indian Govt to change oil, gas exploration rules; offers small fields • Oil Price: what went wrong: what they predicted a Year Back • The Clincher that was the Nuclear Deal • The true cost of poor quality • A Day In Life of Exxon Mobile Refinery • Americas Will Take Brunt of Any Oil Output Cuts When Iran Returns 3

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IndiScan • Govt to auction 69 idle oil & gas fields ceded by ONGC, OIL • Global crude oil price crash increases India's import dependence • Govt to finalise gas pricing formula soon • GAIL in talks with Iran to revive decade-old $22 billion LNG deal • Cairn India seeks to swap crude for higher margins • With crude flow changing direction towards Asia, it’s a buyer’s market: IOC chief • ONGC Videsh Shortlisted for Mexican Oil Bid Round: Report • Indian Oil plans $3B petrochemicals project in Iran • ONGC, partners to invest $24b in Mozambique gas field • Oil companies slash jet fuel price by 11.7% GlobeScan • Rebels set Aden refinery ablaze in attack • Marcellus to become a net exporter of natural gas this year • Iran to target more petrochemical exports: report • Wood Mackenzie says gasoline surplus after 2017 likely to reverse refinery fortunes • Chambroad Commissions First Propylene and Isobutylene Coproduction Plant In China Using Honeywell Uop Technology • Schlumberger-Cameron deal good for deepwater, bad for Houston

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TrendScan • OPEC’s war on US shale oil: Midsummer update • Oil Explorers Boost U.S. Drilling Even as Price Slumps • IEA Says Oil Prices May Fall Even Further Before Supply Fades in 2016 • Gas industry’s war on the public • China slowdown, oversupply to keep crude prices under pressure • Shale’s Answer to Low Oil Prices: Automation • Oil markets extend gains after biggest daily climb in 6 yrs • Japanese refiners eye cheaper Latin American oil TechScan • BioSafe Safety Glasses Holder • Pages with Nanoparticles Help Filter Water • New catalyst may hasten commercialization of fuel cell vehicles • New fire extinguisher: Bass hum booms flames out • Artificial leaf harnesses sunlight for efficient fuel production • Capture sunlight with your window • Researchers efficiently charge a lithium-ion battery with solar cell • Engineers identify how to keep surfaces dry underwater • Milestone achieved in hybrid artificial photosynthesis • Analysis: Drones gaining traction in oil, gas rig inspection • A mock-up of an inspection report presented through Sky Futures' online portal 5

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• Four Indians in MIT’s 'Innovators Under 35' list • Soaking up carbon dioxide and turning it into valuable products ALTERNATIVE & RENEWABLE ENERGY • India’s Cochin is the World’s First Solar-Powered Airport • Dry Ice Power • Texas researchers find promising solution for storing solar energy • India is quietly contributing in construction of world's largest nuclear fusion reactor • The Future Will Run on Algae HSE, CLIMATE CHANGE & SUSTAINABILITY • Indian Oil's Fire-Hit Unit at Koyali Plant Shut for Maintenance • Six U.S. Universities to study environmental impacts of manufactured chemicals • Best Practices: Shock Top Beer Pours Out WaterSaving Campaign in California • eBay’s 7 best practices for successful collaboration • Circular Economy Product Design Challenge Kicks Off • California Drought Is Made Worse by Global Warming, Scientists Say • We can tackle climate change without wrecking the economy: Obama • Will carbon-sucking technologies prove costeffective?

• The controversial quest to stop climate change by pulling carbon out of the air

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• Falcon Waterfree Technologies has launched watersaving hybrid urinal technology to the US new construction market • Fracking Water Management Market Remains Buoyant • The Intersection of Water, Energy and Climate • A brief history of global climate negotiations • The truth that gets washes away in Water Business • Climate change is something business can fix • Making Treating, Recycling Fracking Water More Economical • Aquatech Introduces Aquar2ro™ Process For Zero Liquid Discharge And High Recovery Plants • 3M GHG Emissions Drop 64% • Coastal energy industry bracing for climate change, website reports THE BANYAN TREE • Why performance appraisals fail: A root-cause analysis and alternative • When quiet is right: Why introverts make better leaders • How Amazon's leadership principles corrupted its culture • Simplicity is the antidote to complexity • How Much Would You Sacrifice to Start Your Own Business?

F2F • Innovation needed for long-term sustainability, says Prof. Thomke of HBS • Assam field a 'new growth opportunity': HOEC

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Editorial Note Dear Patron of Petrotech, First half of the year 2015 is coming to close, and we had witnessed many ups and downs in our industry, starting from oil prices to investments in the upstream industry hitting the trough, with only good news for the downstream oil refining and petrochemicals booming with margins and projects in hand.

The signing of agreement between Iran, US and European countries raised prospects of lifting economic blockade on Iran and Iranian oil flowing freely into the market, which also raised the prospects of further fall in oil prices. • In this background, last month, the Govt of India, broke the long awaited news, about opening-up of its marginal and small oil and gas fields to exploration through open bidding. Even though it's about small and marginal fields, they are not small. The Govt. is now ready with its policies and plans to put 69 marginal fields on auction, which together hold about 89 million tonnes of hydrocarbon resources worth 700 billion rupees ($11 billion).

India, the world's No.4 oil consumer, meets only a fraction of its demand through local sources, and therefore, any effort to boost the local supplies is always welcome.

We may recall that the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, while inaugurating first 'Urja Sangam' in March this year, had called for reducing oil imports by 10 % by 2022, and increasing own production is certainly one of the major contributor in achieving this difficult goal, besides, reducing demand, improving efficiency and developing alternative and renewable sources of energy.

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In this issue of PetroScan, you would find more on this new initiative of the Govt, about which our highly enthusiastic Hon’ble Minister of MoPNG, Mr Pradhan described it as a paradigm shift in the fiscal management of the oil sector," which "definitely" will be seen in the future.

Hopeful and confident Mr Pradhan responding to the concerns about low global oil prices resulting into a lukewarm response from MNCs, opined that it was an opportune time as the current cost of services and rigs was low.

We shall wait and watch till end of this year, when the bids are likely to be invited by the Govt. of India for exploring these small and marginal fields. • Depressed oil prices have not only helped the oil importing countries, downstream oil refining and petrochemical, and it has also induced surge in global demand. IEA has recently reported that "The world is now expected to use 1.6 million b/d more fuel in 2015 than the previous year as economic growth consolidates and consumers burn more oil. That's the biggest growth spurt in five years and a dramatic uptick on a demand increase of just 700,000 b/d in 2014,".

The IEA report also finds that OECD stocks had hit a record 2.92 billion barrels in June, meaning any unwinding would take time.

"While a rebalancing has clearly begun, the process is likely to be prolonged as a supply overhang is expected to persist through 2016 -- suggesting global inventories will pile up further". The world had seen a supply "overhang" of 3.0 million b/d in the second quarter, the widest in 17 years, while supply is likely to exceed demand by 1.4 million b/d in the second half of this year, "testing storage limits worldwide," • This issue of PetroScan carries a feature on the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina highlighting what energy companies can 9

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learn from this unprecedented storm, which, in view of the overhanging shadows of climate change, may be a frequently visiting our shores and off-shores in future. •

It also carries a feature on the 95th Anniversary of one of the EXXON Mobil Refineries in US. It may however be recalled that Digboi Refinery of IndianOil will soon be celebrating its 115th Anniversary, which is certainly a big day of the Indian O&G Industry. I have always been of the view that this fountainhead of Indian Oil exploration, production and Refining Industry must be declared a Heritage place, and Petro Skill development Centre must be raised here for the newly inducted engineers and oil technologists.

Hope you shall find this compendium of global news and views, related to our industry and interesting reading and useful as reference.

Let us wait watch the developments of our industry until we meet again with our next issue of PetroScan.

Wishing you joyous season of festivals in the coming months,

(Anand Kumar) Director, Petrotech

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Editor’s Choice Hurricane Katrina 10 years later: What energy companies can learn from firms that weathered the storm Aug 31, 2015, Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/print-edition/2015/08/28/hurricane-katrina-10-years-laterwhat-energy.html?s=print

“We always had a plan in place, but with the full devastation that came with Katrina, we had to create a new plan," said Sallie Rainer, president and CEO of Entergy Texas, which in the wake of the storm, hundreds of people from Entergy’s New Orleans headquarters were shifted to The Woodlands, with some staying permanently. Hurricane Katrina's 10th anniversary is Aug. 29.

Tanya Rutledge, Special to Houston Business Journal W&T Offshore Inc. had already been mapping out plans to relocate its headquarters from New Orleans to Houston when Hurricane Katrina hit the Crescent City a decade ago. But the monster hurricane forced W&T to expedite its relocation plans into what essentially became a window consisting of just a few days.

The oil and natural gas producer, which has most of its operations offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and onshore in the Permian Basin of West Texas, moved 150 employees and their families to Houston almost overnight, putting them in host homes, hotels and other spots, and finding them clothing and schooling for their children. W&T (NYSE: WTI) then set out to lease additional office space near the company’s existing Greenway Plaza office to house the evacuated employees, who were sharing offices two- and three-people deep.

“We did have a disaster plan, but it didn’t include a total move of the office from one city to another overnight,” said Tracy W. Krohn, 11

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chairman and CEO of W&T, who was already living in Houston and commuting back and forth to New Orleans regularly at the time of the hurricane. “We brought families and their pets and found them places to live, clothing and cars. It was quite a logistical exercise.”

Then, just two and a half weeks later, Hurricane Rita was threatening to hit Houston.

Not willing to take any chances this time around, W&T chartered a 757 airplane and took all of the employees that were now in Houston to Kansas City.

“Our employees were already shell-shocked,” Krohn said. “We loaded up the employees, pets, extended families and left. When the storm ended up turning, we came back four days later. It was quite an undertaking.”

Relocating W&T is one of several companies that shifted some or all of its operations to Houston — either temporarily or permanently — following Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane that went down as the costliest U.S. hurricane on record.

Krohn said most of the 150 displaced W&T employees ended up staying in Houston permanently, while between 25 and 30 employees returned. The company now employs about 200 people in its Greenway Plaza headquarters.

Those transplants were among the 150,000 people who took refuge in Houston following the Aug. 29, 2005, storm. About 70,000 of those people chose to stay in Houston, which had a population of 5.5 million at the time, according to research by the Greater Houston Partnership.

Sallie Rainer, president and CEO of Entergy Texas, said her company, which is owned by New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., an integrated energy company engaged in electric power production and retail distribution operations, was also tested by the storm.

“Katrina had a temporary impact and a lasting impact on our operations here,” she said from Entergy’s offices in The Woodlands, where she is based.

In the wake of the storm, hundreds of people from Entergy’s New Orleans headquarters were shifted to The Woodlands, with some 12

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staying permanently and some eventually returning. The Woodlands operation, which had about 300 employees prior to 2005, now employs 465 people, both through relocations from New Orleans and internal growth.

Rainer, who had nine people staying in her Houston home in the wake of the hurricane, said the company’s internal disasterpreparedness plan was also turned upside down based on the sheer level of destruction leveled by Katrina.

“It was a huge learning experience,” she said. “We always had a plan in place, but with the full devastation that came with Katrina, we had to create a new plan. We developed much more robust plans built on business continuity. Our company is much more focused on preparation now and having plans in place for that. There is a lot of coordination that has to happen.”

New technology Technological developments that have taken place over the past 10 years, such as employees having the ability to take their laptops home with them and being able to connect remotely from nearly anywhere, have helped push preparedness to a new level.

But companies have also taken it upon themselves to be more prepared in terms of logistics based on lessons learned from Katrina, Rainer said.

“There are much better ways to communicate with employees now,” she said. “We did a lot in the way of preparedness before Katrina, and after that, it became clear to employees why we did it.”

While many New Orleans companies were working to execute their own disaster recovery plans in response to Katrina, the city of Houston played a big part in getting these companies and their people back on their feet by opening public shelters, feeding the evacuees, getting children enrolled in schools and helping relocated employees reconnect with their companies, W&T’s Krohn said.

Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of research at the Greater Houston Partnership, said Houston had a chance to step up to the plate when the spotlight turned on the Bayou City — and it did.

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“After all of this, one of the Dallas papers named Houston as person of the year,” he said.”That shows what a big impact we made on the rest of the world.”

The effect on the city itself could be seen through short-term trends such as skyrocketing hotel occupancy rates and a surge in restaurant and retail spending. The longer-term impact could be seen through apartment occupancy rates and an increase in cargo through Houston-area ports.

Jankowski recalls that many apartment landlords opted to waive deposits, background checks and credit checks in order to provide living spaces for evacuees, and office-building landlords were willing to offer short-term leases for three or six months.

Although there were some high-profile corporate relocations — such as W&T — and some smaller relocations as well, Jankowski said the only major lasting impact was that Houston’s population grew by about 190,000 that year after seeing increases more in the range of 110,000 per year in prior years.

“The main thing is that the way Houston reacted made Houstonians feel good about themselves,” he said. “A lot of companies started thinking more about their disaster plans and things like that, but what was remembered more was that in a time of severe adversity, Houston stepped forward.”

In fact, many Entergy employees who opted to move to Houston permanently did so after seeing how the community reached out to them after Katrina, Rainer said.

“The aspect of what this community did, opening its arms to the evacuees, inspired so many people to stay,” she said.

Staffing firm saw wave of new business after Katrina When Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans in 2005, Cenergy International’s services were in demand more than ever.

The energy-focused staffing and consulting agency June Ressler founded from her home office in New Orleans in 1996 was boasting annual revenue of more than $20 million. She was hiring. And when the city was devastated, her clients needed Cenergy’s services.

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“The lion’s share of our business was placing consultants in the oil field,” she said. “There were a lot of safety needs, a need for a lot of extra help. After Katrina, there were platforms pushed off their mooring and their drill ship. It was a mess, and companies needed many extra people to be able to clean it up.”

The storm was a boon to Ressler’s business, which meant more growth and more revenue.

But it also was a double-edged sword: She had more work for her consultants than ever, but Cenergy’s clients’ weren’t paying their bills fast enough for Ressler to pay hers. One of Cenergy’s major clients was paying with paper checks. And without mail in the wake of the storm, Cenergy couldn’t get the money. For nine months.

“That was a sweaty time,” Ressler said. “The worst thing would be to say, ‘Our company can’t make payroll’ all of a sudden. Consultants would jump ship, and why wouldn’t they? It’s the kiss of death.”

Compounding the problem was that Cenergy had grown nearly 100 percent in a year. But the regional bank the company was working with hadn’t extended its line of credit. One bank employee even told Ressler she needed to “stop growing so fast.”

When Ressler got the bad news, she immediately called the bank and asked again for an increase in its line of credit.

The bank said no. It couldn’t help on such short notice.

So that Friday, Ressler dipped into her savings to pay her consultants. And the following Monday, she was sitting in a Chase Bank office, opening a business account. She paid herself back and made sure that her bank rep always knew when the business was growing, when they would need more credit and when money was tight and they needed cash to make payroll.

She officially moved her business to Houston in 2007 and posted $250 million in revenue in 2014.

Broker helped Shell with office space, apartments after Katrina

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Tim Relyea, executive vice chairman for Cushman & Wakefield of Texas Inc., was in New Orleans negotiating a new lease agreement for Houston-based Shell Oil Co. when Katrina rolled into the Crescent City.

He left early to avoid the storm’s path but returned the next night to negotiate a disaster-recovery lease, relocating a few key employees temporarily to Baton Rouge. He and his business partner, Joe Peddie, also arranged for apartments to temporarily house 500 employees in Houston.

Because so many evacuees fled to Houston, furnished apartments were scarce. Relyea called in a favor and convinced a friend who had recently closed a local hotel to reopen it to house the additional employees.

“The storm was a disaster. It no longer was a real estate transaction.

It became more of an issue of helping people that were really in need,” Relyea said. “Joe and I dropped everything we were doing and tried to help out as much as we could.”

Katrina Effect by the numbers 150,000 — Number of Hurricane Katrina evacuees who made their way to Houston following the August 2005 hurricane, staying in public shelters, hotels and in homes of family or friends, plus some host homes.

80,000 — About how many evacuees decided to stay in Houston permanently after the storm. Houston’s population, which typically grows by about 110,000 per year, grew by 190,000 that year.

17,000 — Apartment units absorbed in the fourth quarter of 2005, which is about 10 times the normal absorption rate. Occupancy rates moved to above 90 percent that quarter.

1,000 — Containers of bananas received each week at the Port of Freeport after Hurricane Katrina due to cargo being diverted from

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Louisiana. Freeport normally received 300 containers of bananas a week.

75% — Hotel occupancy in the fourth quarter of 2005, up from 58 percent in the fourth quarter of 2002, 2003, and 2004. Occupancy stayed above 70 percent in the first quarter of 2006 but returned to the mid-60s by midyear.

- There are lessons for everyone to be extracted by analyzing this article. AK

Halliburton and Baker Hughes merger: Efficiency alone is not enough, case study shows Aug 28, 2015, Vikas Mittal and Utpal Dholakia Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke professor of marketing at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

Conventional wisdom suggests that mergers make business sense.

When firms merge, they cut costs by reducing redundant activities and consolidating operations, expand scope and free up capital for further growth. A case study of a large-scale merger in Houston coupled with recent research by Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business provides valuable lessons in the benefits and pitfalls of adhering to conventional wisdom.

Last November, two of the largest energy employers in Houston — Halliburton Co. (NYSE: HAL) and Baker Hughes Inc. (NYSE: BHI) — the second- and third-largest oilfield services firms in the world, decided to merge.

Both companies provide drilling and hydraulic fracturing services to a large customer base of oil and natural gas companies. Baker Hughes has the innovative products and technological know-how to drill new

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wells and boost production in older wells. Halliburton is well-known for its capacity for operational support and logistics management.

With depressed oil prices and mounting pressures on margins, such a merger — and an efficiency-based logic — may make even more sense. However, for mergers to succeed, efficiency alone is not enough. There is a need for dual emphasis — simultaneously achieving high levels of customer and efficiency focus. While customer focus helps firms to expand revenues through sales and pricing power, efficiency focus enables firms to increase profitability by cutting costs.

Rice surveyed 1,900 professionals to see how they perceive large energy companies.

While Baker Hughes is perceived as being more customer-focused, Halliburton is seen as being more financially-focused.

Emphasizing one at the expense of the other would be a serious mistake. We found that only when firms can simultaneously achieve a customer focus and efficiency focus can they add value through mergers. To realize the intended synergies, people from both companies must be able to work closely with each other and demonstrate this to industry outsiders. This should enable them to unlock shareholder value by achieving a dual emphasis, a key to success in the oilfield services sector.

See the Chart:

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A.Strategy map interesting insights • Baker Hughes and Halliburton are not perceived to be similar by people in the energy industry.

•

Baker Hughes is most associated with corporate social responsibility, safety and customer focus.

• •

Halliburton is more strongly associated with global focus, financial management and human resources.

• Both Baker Hughes and Halliburton are less strongly associated with innovation and vendor satisfaction.

•

•

B. Perceived performance by insiders For oilfield service firms (out of 10 points) How well do oilfield service firms stack up on a 10-point scale for performance? Rice University surveyed 1,900 professionals in the energy sector to see how they perceive the 51 largest oil and gas firms on more than 25 attributes. In the oilfield services sector, results showed their performance rates relatively higher on financial management and safety but relatively lower on innovation, crisis handling and corporate social responsibility. These ratings suggest that the oilfield services sector as a whole rates in the mid-high range (between 5.5 and 7.5). As part of this sector, the merged entity of Halliburton and Baker Hughes will have substantial room for improvement.

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TOP

Editor’s Pick IEA sees 2015 demand growth at five-year high of 1.6 million b/d London (Platts)--12 Aug 2015 649 am EDT/1049 GMT * Russia, China, Argentina, Brazil beat demand expectations * Demand response to low prices not to last indefinitely The International Energy Agency on Wednesday raised its forecast of world oil demand growth in 2015 by 200,000 b/d to 1.6 million b/d, highlighting a "drastic uptick" largely as a result of low prices.

It also predicted a supply overhang would persist through 2016.

In its latest monthly oil market report, the IEA said it saw "no backing down" by OPEC in its drive to defend its market share by maintaining output.

"Since the Riyadh-led OPEC decision last November to defend market share rather than price, output from the 12-member group has soared by 1.4 million b/d and it looks as if there is no backing down," it said.

OPEC crude supply had "held steady" at 31.79 million b/d in July, just 15,000 b/d lower than in June, as Saudi Arabia eased off to accommodate record high levels from Iraq and the UAE, it said. Saudi Arabia produced 10.40 million b/d, down from 10.48 million b/d in June.

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Surging global demand prompted the IEA to raise its estimate of the "call" on OPEC in 2016 by 500,000 b/d to 30.8 million b/d.

"The world is now expected to use 1.6 million b/d more fuel in 2015 than the previous year as economic growth consolidates and consumers burn more oil. That's the biggest growth spurt in five years and a dramatic uptick on a demand increase of just 700,000 b/d in 2014," the report said.

Demand had been quicker to react to the oil glut than the production side of the industry, with low prices and "solidified" economic growth both playing a role, it said.

Upgrades to Chinese second-quarter data contributed to the IEA's revised forecast, as did strong demand in Argentina, Brazil and Russia.

Global supply fell by 600,000 b/d month on month in July due to falling in non-OPEC supply, the IEA estimated.

And it forecast non-OPEC oil supply would decelerate through the second half of this year and fall in 2016, by 200,000 b/d to 57.9 million b/d, with US growth taking a hit.

While some US producers of light tight oil "might be successful in lifting output in the short-run, we expect the majority will struggle to sustain higher rates over longer periods due to steep spending curbs," it said.

SLOW REBALANCING The IEA said OECD stocks had hit a record 2.92 billion barrels in June, meaning any unwinding would take time.

"While a rebalancing has clearly begun, the process is likely to be prolonged as a supply overhang is expected to persist through 2016 - suggesting global inventories will pile up further," it said.

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The world had seen a supply "overhang" of 3.0 million b/d in the second quarter, the widest in 17 years, while supply is likely to exceed demand by 1.4 million b/d in the second half of this year, "testing storage limits worldwide," the IEA said.

However it added that "the pace of stock builds should ease over H2 2015 as non-OPEC supply growth is expected to slow."

In the longer term, the IEA said low oil prices could not be expected to increase demand indefinitely, particularly given increased efficiency on the consumption side.

In the OECD, demand growth had already started to slow in the second quarter of this year compared with the first quarter, most notably in Europe, it said.

"Lower crude prices logically have a positive impact upon demand... but the price adjustment needs to be very sizeable to raise demand growth significantly as was the case in H1," the IEA said.

"A repeat along this scale is unlikely and future demand growth is expected to decelerate due to the return of some long-entrenched efficiency gains."

NON-BEARISH RUSSIA

On the non-OECD however, the IEA again revised its view of Russian demand to the upside.

"The latest Russian June oil demand estimate -- at an upwardly revised 3.7 million b/d...is a far cry above our previously 'bearish' stance on Russia," the IEA said.

"Industrial oil use appears to have held up better than previously foreseen. Although the economy has undoubtedly contracted, the recent sharp declines in the value of the domestic currency have, in some cases, made Russian industry costs competitive again," it said, highlighting recovery in Russia's steel industry.

--Nick Coleman, nick.coleman@platts.com --Edited by Maurice Geller, maurice.geller@platts.com

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Fracking Chemicals and Human Development Greg Watry, Digital Reporter, R&D Magazine, Fri, 08/28/2015 After initially injected into a well, a portion of hydraulic fracturing fluid returns to the surface immediately, dubbed “flow-back,” and some seeps up over the well’s lifespan, called “produced water.” A combination of water, chemical additives and naturally occurring substances, the fluid is typically stored at a fracking site before treatment, recycling or disposal.

But the Environmental Protection Agency warns the excess fluid may have impacts on drinking water resources due to contaminants and byproducts sneaking through the treatment process, surface discharge and spillage.

According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal report, roughly 15.3 million Americans live within a mile of a fracking well.

Researchers from the Univ. of Missouri recently analyzed data from more than 100 peer-reviewed studies that examined links between unconventional oil and gas operation chemicals and human development. They determined the available research suggests a need for an investigation into potential adverse health outcomes, specifically to the endocrine system, a network of glands that produces hormones to regulate growth, metabolism and reproduction.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals adversely affect the body’s development. According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, such inhibitors are both naturally occurring and manmade.

A 2011 report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce found the 14 leading oil and gas service companies used hydraulic fracturing products containing 750 chemicals, which ranged from harmless, such as salt and citric acid, to “extremely toxic,” such as benzene and lead.

“We recommend a process to examine the total endocrine disrupting activity from exposure to the mixtures of chemicals used in and resulting from these operations in addition to examining the effects of 23

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each chemical on its own,” said university researcher Susan C. Nagel. “Studying these complex mixtures of chemicals released during fracking is necessary since the chemical identities used in oil and natural gas operations is not always known.”

According to the researchers, benzene, among other volatile organic compounds, are associated with impaired fertility and fecundity “via reduced semen quality and impaired menstrual cycles, as well as increased risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, preterm birth and birth defects.”

The researchers cite The Endocrine Disruption Exchange as a resource for a list of health effects associated with chemicals used and produced by oil and gas operations. Of the 980 products identified to be used, 90% had one potential health effect. Around 47% of the products contained one or more chemicals considered to be endocrine disruptors.

The researchers call for a number of recommendations to evaluate the risk of endocrine disrupting chemicals in hydraulic fracturing fluid, including controlled laboratory animal studies and measurements of chemicals in humans and wildlife, among other recommendations.

However there is one caution: Firstly the p roduced water is not flow back water. Flow back water is a temporary flow that is the result of frac'ing the well. Once the well is "completed" and in "production", the remaining water that comes along with the gas or oil that is "produced", is considered produced water, which may be entirely existing water from the well that got there naturally. It also could be the result of well stimulation fluids, which are not frac water or flow back water. Yes, that water may have chemical additives as well.

As for toxicity, for sure there are lots of formulations used for frac'ing and well stimulation and people are right to be skeptical. The chemical suppliers claim the chemistry is proprietary and it is, but people have a right to know what compounds are being utilized, at least in their basic sense and whether they are toxic. But people should also know that much (most?) of the toxicity, including benzene, is naturally-occurring in the well. These are hydrocarbons 24

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that we are extracting after all so of course there will be toxic compounds naturally occurring down hole.

Instead of over-reacting, we need to be rational and stop proliferating misinformation and FUD. We got to stop thinking the movie Gasland was real, too. This article does a pretty good job of defining flow back water but it confuses a bit with produced water. Totally different things. Especially considering produced water comes along with wells that are not frac'ed, but may be stimulated or simply naturallyoccurring.

Indian Govt to change oil, gas exploration rules; offers small fields NEW DELHI, Landing | Wed Sep 2, 2015 India is set to ease the rules for new oil and gas exploration blocks to lure foreign investment and tap the nation's vast energy resources in a bid to cut its crude import bill.

To begin with, New Delhi has decided to auction 69 small, marginal oil and gas fields to private firms on a revenue-sharing model, offering pricing and marketing freedom to the operators.

"It is a paradigm shift in the fiscal management of the oil sector," and "definitely" will be seen in the future, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Wednesday, when asked if the revenue-sharing model would be copied in subsequent rounds.

To minimise intervention by state agencies, under new rules the government will not be concerned with the costs incurred for production and will receive a share of the gross revenue from the sale of hydrocarbons at market rates.

Under current rules the government gets a share from the profit after the contractor recovers its investment costs.

"Under the profit-sharing methodology it became necessary for the government to scrutinize cost details of private participants and this led to many delays and disputes," Pradhan said.

India, the world's No.4 oil consumer, meets only a fraction of its demand through local sources and wants to boost private and foreign 25

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participation in its industry, which is now dominated by state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp and Oil India.

The 69 fields on offer hold about 89 million tonnes of hydrocarbon resources worth 700 billion rupees ($11 billion), Pradhan said at a press conference.

Pradhan expects the bidding process to start in three months for the fields, which ONGC and Oil India gave up as uneconomical due to size, geography and low state-set energy prices.

Also for the first time, a single licence will allow operators to explore for both conventional and unconventional resources, such as shale oil and gas and coal-seam gas.

Dousing concerns that low global oil prices would mean a lukewarm response, Pradhan said: "Currently the cost of services and rigs is low, so this is an opportune time to look for these assets. It will take three to four years to begin production." ($1 = 66.2550 rupees) (Reporting by Nidhi Verma and Nigam Prusty; Editing by Tom Hogue)

OIL Price: What they predicted a Year Back WHAT WENT WRONG Why Triple-Digit Oil Is the ‘New Normal’ By: Jens Erik Gould July 16, 2014,thefinancialist.com

When the idea of high oil prices comes to mind, one quickly recalls the hot months of 2008, when crude prices of nearly $150 a barrel had summer drivers rethinking the cost vs. benefit equation of road trips. But one silver lining of the global financial crisis and economic slowdown was that it brought prices back down below $50 a barrel in November of that same year. And here we are again: Last month, the 26

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five-year rolling average price of Brent crude topped $100 a barrel for the first time ever. Worse yet, Credit Suisse energy commodity analyst Jan Stuart doesn’t think another reprieve is in the cards. He calls the current price level “a new normal.”

How did we get back here so quickly and why are prices likely to stay put? On the demand side, it’s quite simple. Both the global economy as well as global population continue to grow, and along with them demand for fossil fuels. Global oil demand has fallen only two times in the past two decades: the height of the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. Global consumption should increase by 1.4 million barrels a day, or 1.5 percent, to a record 92.7 billion a day in 2014, according to the International Energy Agency, which raised its forecast in March as the economic recovery gained momentum. For its part, supply is not keeping up with demand.

While U.S. production has grown substantially thanks to shale drilling, the U.S. is the only major non-OPEC nation posting significant production increases. All-in, last year’s oil consumption grew by 1.4 million barrels a day, while production only increased 560,000 barrels a day, according to the BP Statistical Review of Energy. As has been the case since the start, the main threat to oil supply is geopolitics. Increasing sectarian violence in Iraq, for example, has once again put the 150 billion barrels of proven oil reserves of OPEC’s second-largest producer into question, in the process helping to push the price of Brent to a high of $115.19 on June 19.

Back in 2009, expectations were high: New investment by foreign oil companies was going to double Iraq’s output to 5 million barrels a day by 2013 and further increase it to 8 million by 2019. And that, in turn, would account for some 60 percent of OPEC’s overall production increase through decade’s end. Yet we’re nearly halfway through the decade and production is around 3.2 million barrels a day. Brent prices have dipped back below $110, and the current spasm of violence hasn’t reached the oil producing south, but companies including ExxonMobil and BP have begun evacuating employees, and investors are worried that continued violence could render even more 27

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modest production forecasts a pipe dream. Iraq is just one example of many.

The wave of political uprising exuberantly (and prematurely) coined the “Arab Spring” has left oil supply problems in its wake nearly everywhere it has rolled through. Protests that began last summer in Libya, which holds Africa’s largest reserves, cut output to around 350,000 barrels a day from the 1.4 million barrels a day the country was producing last year, although the country recently restarted production at its El Sharara field, which will hopefully bring between 300,000 and 340,000 barrels a day back online after a four-month strike by protesters. In South Sudan, fighting between the president and his former deputy has cut output by roughly one-third to around 160,000 barrels a day since December.

Conflicts in Syria and Yemen have also cut output. “The instability in the Middle East and North Africa is so fundamental that it’s going to take a very long time for it to become a stable place for the oil industry,” says Stuart. In the meantime, production has fallen by a total of between 3 million and 3.5 million barrels a day since February 2011, according to Credit Suisse. So let’s get back to this ‘new normal.’ Last month, Credit Suisse raised its forecast for average Brent prices in 2014 and 2015 to $110.64 and $102.50 from $107.03 and $97.50, respectively. And these things do not happen in a vacuum. Every $10 a barrel increase in oil prices reduces real U.S. income growth by as much as 0.4 percent, according to Credit Suisse estimates. “We are worried about the political events in the Middle East,” says James Sweeney, chief economist for Credit Suisse’s investment bank.

“A meaningful shock in oil could really disturb a lot of our cyclical outlook.”

- See more at: http://www.thefinancialist.com/why-triple-digit-oil-isthe-new-normal/#sthash.x9yL9gdZ.dpuf

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From the Pages of History: The Clincher that was the Nuclear Deal M K Narayan, The Hindu. August 15, 2015 The India-U.S. nuclear deal signed 10 years ago is an exemplar of Indias recognition of strategic patience and the importance of building partnerships and has brought in handsome returns As India celebrates yet another Independence Day, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi embarks on another foreign visit this time to the United Arab Emirates, intending to sign a clutch of agreements, including one on counter-terrorism cooperation it might be worthwhile to ponder over how far India has progressed on the world stage.

Members of the younger generation would be unfamiliar, for instance, of the kind of trials and privations that India confronted during the last quarter of the twentieth century. This was the period following the 1974 peaceful nuclear explosion and the 1998 nuclear tests, when India was ostracised by many countries and faced a host of sanctions. From this dark period, India could emerge into a new dawn thanks to the efforts of Indian policy-makers during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-Manmohan Singh years. India has since been transformed into a major global power, and a candidate for permanent membership in the U.N. Security Council (UNSC).

M.K. Narayanan The Iran-India contrast Succeeding against exceptional odds is a quality India derives from its ancient civilisation. Today, as the nation enters its 69th year, it may not be out of place, hence, to make a comparison with similar situations faced by two ancient civilisations India and Iran and the different outcomes that resulted from those situations. In July this year, Iran and the P5+1 countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, China and Germany) reached a nuclear agreement, ending a period of ostracism and sanctions of the West toward Iran. July also marked the 10th anniversary of the iconic India29

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U.S. civil nuclear deal. However, the objective and scope of the two deals could not have been more different.

The Iran deal curtails and constricts Irans capabilities as a nuclear power. The India-U.S. nuclear deal, on the other hand, liberated India in many ways, effectively dismantled the edifice of sanctions, and has resulted in India being recognised as a state with advanced nuclear technology a euphemism for a nuclear weapons state.

The Iran nuclear agreement weakened Irans nuclear programme, and denied it the capability of becoming a nuclear threshold state in the foreseeable future. Restrictions on Iran include a freeze on its nuclear research programme; preventing it from producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon (either through Uranium enrichment or through the Plutonium route) at its nuclear facilities for at least 10 years; ensuring that it would not have recourse to advanced centrifuges for at least a decade; restricting its store of enriched uranium to levels below that needed for a nuclear device; and blocking its plutonium programme.

The India-U.S. nuclear deal, as against this, was truly path-breaking in terms of its favourable impact. Ten years down the road, the results are evident for all to see.

While India did not host any event to mark the deal, Washington brought together some of the movers and shakers from both sides, highlighting its transformational nature and how it was helping to shape the course of world events in the 21st century. The thrust was on how to further strengthen cooperation between the two largest democracies in the world, and sustain the underlying spirit behind the deal.

Criticism that the India-U.S. deal had failed to deliver amounts to missing the wood for the trees. Measuring outcomes based on a select laundry list of items complaining that energy security remains evanescent, that many dual-use technologies remain out of Indias reach, and that entry into the Multilateral Export Control Regime still eludes India is misleading. This is because the real achievement is that the nuclear deal has been the key to technology redemption.

Energy security was, undoubtedly, one of the main considerations underlying thedeal, and considerable progress has been made in this 30

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direction, with much more to come. Equally important, however, was the need to find ways and means to dismantle the technology denial regime that hampered Indias scientific, technological and economic progress. While for the U.S., strategic convergence was one of the imperatives, Indias focus was on energy and technology initiatives.

No one expected that the barricades erected over the years against transfer of high technology would just melt away once the deal was signed, sealed and delivered. India did not wish to act as the barbarian at the gate, demanding instant dismantling of various restrictions nor was it in a position to do so. It recognised that a great deal of hard work was called for to complete the process. This is what has been happening since.

The U.S.s endorsement of the achievements of Indian nuclear scientists inherent in its acknowledgment of India as a state with advanced nuclear technology apart, the extent to which the nuclear deal has led to the unlocking of Indias potential is significant.

In specific terms, outcomes have been very substantial. Without it, the task of removing restrictions on dual-use and high-end technologies would not have even begun, let alone happened. For instance, there wouldnt have been even a consideration of Indias entry into the Wassenaar Arrangement on export controls for dualuse technologies, critical for obtaining crucial dual-use technologies, including for cyber-security research.

With the nuclear deal, which has the imprimatur of the U.S. and the IAEA, together with an unconditional waiver given by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), India is well-positioned to breach the digital divide that restricts Western companies and governments from supplying us crucial technology.

Energy nirvana The civil nuclear energy sector has been the biggest gainer. The lifting of restrictions on civil nuclear trade between India and the rest of the world has paved the way for uranium imports. Availability of imported uranium ensures that our Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) and Light Water Reactors (LWRs) can now operate at full capacity.

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The Fast Reactor Programme can correspondingly be accelerated.

Indias experiment with Fast Breeder Reactors should gain still further momentum. Spent fuel from PHWRs recycled in Fast Breeder Reactors after reprocessing, has the potential of increasing our energy quotient several-fold. The proportion of nuclear energy in our energy mix should then increase from the current 3 to 4 per cent by an order of several magnitudes. As the Fast Breeder Programme advances, and attains a certain level of performance, we should also be able to utilise our extensive thorium deposits. Our scientists believe in theory at least that this will lead to energy nirvana.

Meanwhile, despite the doomsday predictions of critics and pessimists, countries like Russia and France have embarked on the building of new nuclear reactors of bigger capacity. Russia has committed itself to building two more 1,000 MWE nuclear reactors, with promises of six more. France is about to commit itself to building two nuclear reactors. This momentum is likely to encourage others to follow in their wake.

Linked to the nuclear deal are other changes, some of which are already evident. The U.S. has effected certain changes to its export control laws, and with this, India and the U.S. are today exploring coproduction and co-development in defence technologies. After years of isolation, U.S. and Indian scientific communities are coming together in path-breaking joint research in several sectors. An energy dialogue has been initiated with the U.S. the accent being on clean energy and coal. The U.S. has collaborated in Indias Mars and Moon missions.

Possibly the most enduring impress of the India-U.S. nuclear deal is in creating a new awareness across the world that Indias ancient wisdom is now embroidered with new paradigms of thought, action and behaviour. Indias successful diplomatic initiative to win friends among the global community for the nuclear deal (most of whom were opposed to granting India any special exemption) has helped many of them to view India from a totally new perspective. It has also enabled India to unlock doors vis-Ă -vis certain countries Saudi Arabia for instance which hitherto tended to view India solely through the Cold

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War prism. A new framework of relationships across the world has been established.

Most important, an agreement of this kind, unique in the annals of the history of global nuclear negotiations, has enabled India to recognise the value of strategic patience and the importance of building partnerships, and of sustaining co-operation. This has given handsome returns in the strategic and non-strategic realm.

(M.K. Narayanan is a former National Security Advisor andformer Governor of West Bengal)

The True Cost of Poor quality Bloch, H. P., HP Knoxville, Tennessee-based System Improvements, Inc., has been in the forefront of teaching structured root-cause analysis throughout the world.

System Improvements, Inc. has used its proprietary software (TapRooT) for its courses and teaching endeavors over several decades. The organization has recently examined the thinking conveyed in old—if not antiquated—quality improvement (QI) language. The company observed language and performance indicators used by industry to monitor quality of output. TapRooT and similar performance software identified important flaws regarding QI programs.

QI trends One of the biggest QI trends was the term “cost of poor quality” (COPQ) as tied with “zero defects.” Indeed, a number of COPQ financial models popped up in many Fortune 500 companies. In the safety world, there was a similar drive with the term “cost of compensation” tied with “zero injuries” and tracking OSHA-driven recordable incidents.

Yet, the focus of both safety and quality was, in each case, a lagging visible indicator. In other words: good or bad, the findings are too late.

Proactive stance But dealing with lagging indicators is just not where reliability professionals should focus their drive and effort.

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While identifying and being able to comprehend the ultimate damage are vital ingredients of the process, a more productive goal would be to spot (and even avoid) problems before they develop. Designing-in quality is more productive (and less expensive) than inspecting components and machines that failed due to lack of poor quality.

Guidelines If you do not assess the quality of work, then how do you know if it is up to standards? Another important issue raised is: “Should I have to trust everybody’s work?” In the safety world, the phrase “Safety must be part of every action we do,” is often said but not necessarily followed. Industry professionals do sympathize with the present situation. However, slogans and exhortations are part of the bucketlabeled, “consultant-conceived” generalities. Too often, little or no value-adding guidance is given by clever slogans. More managers would do well to ask: What are the goals for the safety and/or quality programs, and why is it necessary for the company and the employees to follow?

Clear agendas can obtain results To attain better quality and safer work conditions, the TapRooT group recommends three initial steps that the process industry and reliability engineering staffers should consider: 1. Quality and safety are not silos. They should both work together.

Setting up a task that can be worked efficiently, correctly and safely by employees is a shared responsibility. Different job functions should work toward combined quality and safety goals. Quality and safety are inseparable goals; more importantly, they should never be competing goals.

To save money, many companies do not cross-train employees from different departments. Why not, if it makes sense? For example, many operating companies use safety investigation software such as TapRooT’s Root Cause Analysis in safety departments. As more employees in other departments witnessed the benefits with access to the software, the operations and other plant groups have come on board to use such programs as training tools.

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This cross-training concept also works in the opposite direction. As the quality department leaders started working with the safety groups, quality tools were shared with the safety department. Inside all worldclass companies are different departments that are part of the same company, with one common goal.

2. Building quality and safety into a process starts in the beginning stages of planning, but it can be recovered after the employees try to use an existing process. It just costs more time and money!

Root-cause software and tools can be applied to investigate defects and incidents. Early detection and intervention can eliminate failure events with consistent and proactive implementation of best practices. While most quality experts are excellent at mapping out front-end value streams, process maps and similar illustrations, there is often a gap in knowledge of research and industry best practices regarding human engineering, communication, procedures, training and work direction. So, if you were a quality professional and had access to multiple experts every day, would you utilize them?

Perhaps, some self-appraisal is needed: Do you have a list of bestpractice training courses that can give you access?

3. No process, no matter how well-designed, is perpetually stable.

Therefore, it must be periodically audited and assessed based on risk for unknown and known changes. Note: Auditing and assessing are not the same as “inspecting-in quality!”

Point 3 is one of the most misunderstood ingredients relating to inspections. Suppose an entity has a hold-point inspection that must be completed by an independent inspector before a task can be finished or a part received or shipped. In that case, there is a high-risk potential for errors because this task is not constructed as completely “mistake-proofed.” In other words, assume there is a process or task where there are some deviations from “hoped-for” quality. However, we have not truly identified the human and equipment behaviors with their associated root causes and have decided to spend the extra time and money on inspection practices instead of curing the problem 35

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causing the defects. Unless organizations build quality into the process, they cannot claim to be truly proactive.

The author Heinz P. Bloch resides in Westminster, Colorado. His professional career began in 1962 and included long-term assignments as Exxon Chemical’s regional machinery specialist for the US. He has authored over 600 publications, among them 19 comprehensive books on practical machinery management, failure analysis, failure avoidance, compressors, steam turbines, pumps, oil-mist lubrication and practical lubrication for industry. Mr. Bloch holds BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering. He is an ASME Life Fellow and maintains registration as a professional engineer in New Jersey and Texas.

On 95th Anniversary: A Day in Life of Exxon Mobile Refinery Suzanne Edwards, Reporter Houston Business Journal This year is the 95th anniversary of the largest refinery in the U.S. by throughput. The Baytown refinery owned by Irving, Texasbased Exxon Mobil Corp. has been in production and expanded upon numerous times since it first opened in 1920 Sep 1, 2015,

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I visited the 3,400-acre complex of pipes, processors, storage tanks, squat buildings — all anchored by a large office building encased in reflective glass and nestled in lush green landscaping that is oddly out of place in the otherwise bare coastal terrain.

This jungle of cement and metal is the refuge of the energy industry.

Refineries nationwide are flouting their margins thanks to the cheapest feedstock their upstream brethren have offered in years.

While Exxon Mobil is the largest energy employer in Houston with around 13,000 employees, the Baytown refinery has 3,400 direct employees and 3,800 contract personnel.

The plant processes 584,000 barrels per day of crude that comes primarily from tankers from the Persian Gulf, Africa, South America and Mexico. The daily intake culminates in an annual production of 7.2 billion pounds of petrochemical products per year, producing lube oil, waxes, gasoline and other specialized hydrocarbon fluids.

9:30 a.m. — Entering the System I check in with the security personnel in the lobby of the main office building. While waiting for clearance, she confirms my suspicion that the landscaping that surrounds the building is not reflective of Baytown’s natural features. Nothing is open about this office. Long corridors, single doors that close off entire departments, corner rooms with little décor. Perhaps most importantly, no devices of any kind allowed. No cameras and no recorders. My pen and I are on our own.

9:55 a.m. — Onward and upward We jump into one of the handful of black GMC Yukons on standby and set off to take in the sights. Walking around is not permitted without the proper credentials, flame retardant clothing, a helmet, gloves, goggles and steel-toed boots. The day’s tour is to be administered safely behind our vehicle doors.

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10:05 a.m. — Out with the refined The first point of interest is the harbor in the waters near Burnet Bay, which stems from Galveston Bay in the Gulf. This is where feedstock for the machinery comes in — at a fantastically cheap price currently — and refined products go out, thanks to a cat’s cradle of piping.

Duly noted The refinery produces enough gasoline to fill half a million cars a day.

10:10 a.m. — Steamy encounter We turn into a different entrance along Bayway Drive, and follow check-in procedure with the guards.

We pass a “cat unit,” a large cylinder that looked anywhere between four and seven stories tall. This is where mid-grade oil is “cracked,” a process necessary for heavy oils to be transformed into lighter oils. A healthy white steam is billowing out of the top. The steam mutes the dust particles that the cracking catalyst creates.

On the opposite side of the road sits the refining complex’s central fire station with a fully staffed fire brigade.

10:15 a.m. — Safe and secure We pass a single-story brown building with a pebbled façade and I pause to dissect the scene in front of me. Within the nondescript building is one of the brains of the refinery. The hardware and software contained therein is not connected to any outside network, so hackers don’t stand a chance. There’s no cloud technology, just full-on self-containment.

The “Pilot Plant,” aka the chemical brain trust of the complex, is where the first lithium ion battery was created around the time of World War II. 10:27 a.m. — The lab Slowly driving along what may have once been a country road, we come upon the lab where new processes are generated to improve the efficiency and cleanliness of refining methods.

The interior reportedly looks similar to a high-school chemistry class.

10:40 a.m. — Making more while using less We take a slow left and head down another corridor guided by pipes.

People are scarce save a few workers walking around the ground level of a few different structure bases.

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We drive toward what looks like a giant dreidel, easily the size of a small house, only taller. The dreidel-like tank is responsible for the removal of sulfur from clean products.

Due to cogeneration technology, which takes heat from the chemical processes undertaken at numerous places in the complex and converts it into reusable power, there has been a 10 percent reduction in energy intensity.

10:52 a.m. — From trash to coke To our left, we see the tallest derricks in sight, what’s lovingly referred to as the refinery’s garbage disposal. The garbage disposal turns the thickest heavy oil found at the bottom of the barrelinto something useful — a substance called coke that resembles ground up coal used in asphalt.

Planned emergencies The refinery is right on the coast, so hurricane warnings have been frequent over the years. It takes several days to wind down this plant and evacuate its occupants. Split reactive decisions are not a part of that reality. All is carefully planned.

We pass an area where gasoline is produced and stored. The mammoth task of shutting down production is also why the entire refinery goes several years between planned maintenance turnarounds.

11:02 a.m. — New to town We pass the section of campus that produces lube oils, which just begun production this year.

Railroad crossing A Union Pacific railroad runs right through the middle of the complex, and is not used by the refinery.

11:23 a.m. — Execs visit As we leave the matrix of pipes and tanks, I try to imagine a Rex Tillerson-type (Exxon’s CEO) making a spot check visit in an

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immaculate black suit. Apparently top executives visit the refinery grounds several times a year.

Our morning drive through the grounds comes to an end, and I take one last look at the sparse terrain that boasts nothing but the bones and tendons that make up the refinery’s production capacity. And then I look at the carefully preened green grass and tall trees that leave those in the office feeling as if they work in a rainforest of sorts.

Considering how much the refinery is worth, I couldn’t decide which scene was more “lush.”

Americas Will Take Brunt of Any Oil Output Cuts When Iran Returns Anthony Dipaola, September 1, 2015 — Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/americas-will-take-brunt-of-any-oil-output-cuts-as-iran-returns

The Americas will take the brunt of any cuts in oil production as Iran increases output once international sanctions are lifted, according to a report by A.T. Kearney Inc.’s oil and gas consulting practice in Dubai.

North, South and Central American oil production could fall 1.1 million barrels a day by 2020 because of higher costs as Iran’s output climbs, starting with an increase of 800,000 barrels a day next year, Chicago-based A.T. Kearney said in a report overnight Tuesday.

Brent crude prices will range from $45 to $65 a barrel next year, according to the report. The international benchmark was trading at about $48 a barrel on Wednesday.

“With Iran coming back on, there’s the prospect this is going to be a longer-term lower price than we’ve seen before,” Richard Forrest, A.T. Kearney’s lead partner for energy, said in an interview in Dubai before the report.

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“If you look at where the production comes out, it’s North American shale and it’s offshore.”

Iran is preparing to double output after international sanctions end, bringing as much as 1 million barrels a day of new supply into the market. In the U.S., crude production fell as New York oil prices dropped almost 50 percent in the past year on a glut. The U.S. government on Monday said June production fell to 9.3 million barrels a day, the lowest since January.

Iran's oil production Foreign Investment Iran could boost production by as much as 800,000 barrels a day in 2016, said Eduard Gracia, a principal at A.T. Kearney and co-author of the report. A.T. Kearney assumes Iran can boost output by an average of 6 percent a year from now until 2020 as long at it attracts foreign investment to help develop its fields. That pace would put Iran’s output of crude and condensate at 4.955 million barrels a day in 2020, or an increase of about 1.5 million barrels from today, according to A.T. Kearney.

Iran and six global powers reached an agreement in July that would limit the Persian Gulf country’s nuclear program in return for removing sanctions on its energy and financial industries. The restrictions cut

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its oil output from 3.1 million barrels a day in July 2012 to as low as 2.5 million barrels in May 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Profitable Fields The projected drop in production in the Americas is equivalent to a 4 percent decline from 27.5 million barrels a day now, according to A.T. Kearney, which estimates Middle East production at 26.3 million barrels a day. Prices by the end of the decade will allow fields with production costs of $60 to $80 a barrel to produce at profitable levels, according to the study.

“While any oversupply has some impact on price, it’s not going to be as dramatic as what we saw in the previous shifts,” Forrest said, referring to the period when Brent fell from over $100 a barrel in July 2014 to less than half that six months later. That drop was due to concern about slowing global demand, he said.

Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency has reported production could increase by 500,000 barrels a day within a week after sanctions end and by 1 million barrels a day within a month after that. Sanctions against Iran’s oil industry should be lifted by late November, Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh told state TV last month.

Iran may also increase petrochemical output, creating a potential for increased exports and lower prices, Gracia said. Iran has the world’s biggest natural gas reserves, according to BP Plc data.

“Petrochemicals is a way to get their gas exported in the form of another product,” Gracia said.

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IndiScan

Govt to auction 69 idle oil & gas fields ceded by ONGC, OIL Govt to auction small oil fields to private companies While oil is priced at global benchmark currently, a complex international hub based formula determines gas price, which is roughly half of the rate at which India imports gas.

The government will auction 69 idle oil and gas fields of state-owned ONGC and Oil India to private firms on a new revenue sharing model, which will give the bidders pricing and marketing freedom.

The 69 small and marginal fields, which hold 89 million tonne of oil and gas resources worth Rs 70,000 crore at current rates, will be given to explorers offering the maximum revenue from hydrocarbon produced to the government. “This is a paradigm shift from the controversial production sharing contract (PSC) and cost recovery model to a more equitable revenue sharing model that protects government interest in both low oil and high oil price scenarios,” oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan said.

Bidders will be asked to quote the revenue they will share with the government at low and high end of the price and production band.

“We are committed to our Prime Minister’s motto of minimum government, maximum governance. The new model will ensure that there is least government interference in the operations while also providing a fiscal and policy regime that encourages investments,” Pradhan said.

The Cabinet has given its nod to auction 69 oil and gas fields that have been lying idle and were given up by public sector companies such as ONGC and Oil India. Both private and foreign firms will be 43

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allowed to participate in the auction.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday approved auctioning of the fields that state-owned firms surrendered because they were uneconomical to develop due to government's subsidy sharing mechanism.

Upstream companies (like ONGC, Oil India) sell crude and fuel at lower rates to compensate retailers for the losses they incur on selling fuel at government-set rates.

The 2015-16 Budget has estimated India’s subsidy bill at Rs 2.43 trillion, around 9 percent below the revised estimate of Rs 2.66 trillion for 2014-15.

In a press briefing, Minister of State (with Independent charge) for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan said the gas produced will be sold at prevailing market price and the government will also be introducing revenue sharing model for the first time in the oil sector.

Pradhan also said that around Rs 70,000 crore worth of resources will be monetised and the auction process of the 69 fields will start within three months.

Companies offering the maximum revenue share or percentage of oil and gas to the government, and committing to do more work, will win the field. The weight for revenue share will be 80 percent while 20 percent would be for work programme that may include drilling of exploratory and development wells and seismic studies.

Also, the gas produced from these fields will not be under the Allocation Policy.

Terming the Cabinet decision on revenue sharing a paradigm shift, Pradhan said the licence granted will cover all hydrocarbons found in the field.

So far, 254 blocks for exploration and production of oil and gas have been auctioned in nine rounds of New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) since 1999. These have been on production sharing basis where profit is shared with the government after recovery of cost.

ONGC has surrendered 63 discovered oil and gas fields, while Oil 44

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India Ltd (OIL) has surrendered six such fields.

RS Sharma, the former CMD of ONGC called the policies better late than never, considering talks have been on for the past 6-7 years.

He feels a lot of large private players too will also be interested in participating in the auction process.

Giving full marks to the revenue sharing model, Sharma said: "If you look at the current coalbed methane (CBM) production policy it is on revenue sharing model. The producer has the absolute freedom to sell the CBM gas to whomsoever they want at whatever price they want. I know some of the existing players are selling CBM gas at USD 15-20 mmbtu. So, the same flexibility will be available now in these marginal blocks, so I feel it will make it attractive for small players."

Piyush Jain of Morningstar Investment Advisor likes the fact that there will be a single licence for all the margin fields, which means that many of the fields could see clustering and because of that there could be a higher interest from the international players.

Global crude oil price crash increases India's import dependence

By Sanjeev Choudhary, ET Bureau | 24 Aug, 2015, Lower prices have encouraged higher consumption of petroleum products, with increased sales seen in petrol, diesel and cooking gas.

Consumption of petroleum products rose 6% in April-July.

ET SPECIAL:Love visual aspect of news? Enjoy this exclusive slideshows treat!

NEW DELHI: The crash in crude oil prices is making it harder for India to cut its dependence on imports. Cheaper imports not only boost local consumption but also dissuade oil companies from investing in raising domestic production. In March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid a road map for the local industry to cut the country's import dependence by 10% in seven years from 45

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78% at the time. In the four months since then, the import dependence has risen to nearly 80%.

During April-July, India's crude oil production marginally dipped to 12.4 million metric tonnes (MMT) from 12.5 MMT in the corresponding period a year ago. In the same period, crude oil import jumped 6% to 66.3 MMT and petroleum products import climbed 40% to 9.2 MMT. India's self-sufficiency in petroleum products fell to 20.1% from 21.3%.

Lower prices have encouraged higher consumption of petroleum products, with increased sales seen in petrol, diesel and cooking gas.

Consumption of petroleum products rose 6% in April-July.

But a simultaneous decline in local oil and gas output is raising risk for India's energy security ambition. State-run firms — Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and Oil India — are facing ageing fields and are unable to ex explore and put to production new fields, resulting in sluggish output year after year.

For private explorers, a lower crude oil price can be a big deterrent, an oil industry executive said. "Who would want to invest when the realisation is so low?"

Billionaire Anil Agarwal's Cairn India, which controls nearly a quarter of India's crude oil output, has slashed its capital expenditure for 2015-16 by 60%. A senior Cairn executive said in April that the company would produce only from wells that were economically viable at $55 a barrel. The crude oil prices have since fallen to about $45 a barrel.

Shelving projects is a phenomenon sweeping the globe, with big oil firms hesitant in allocating capital to projects economically viable only at higher crude prices.

In India, however, ONGC has been going ahead with many of its projects under pressure from the government. "This is a good time for 46

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ONGC to invest in projects as the oilfield services have become cheaper," said Gaurav Moda, head (oil and gas practice) at financial services firm KPMG India. The rates for oilfield services have fallen by about half and the sophisticated technologies needed for difficult fields are easily available today.

Despite efforts from staterun companies, everyone recognises that achieving a 10% reduction in import dependence is difficult. In the short to medium term, production can be boosted by untangling bureaucracy and expediting the regulatory processes, said Deepak Mahurkar, who leads the oil and gas industry practice at consultancy PwC India.

Govt to finalise gas pricing formula soon Our Bureau, August 28, Centre keen on raising share of gas in energy consumption basket: Pradhan Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Friday said that though pricing of gas was a big challenge, the government would soon finalise a formula to calculate the premium on gas pricing for difficult blocks.

He said that the government wants to increase the share of natural gas in its energy consumption basket by tying up more supplies globally.

“When we declared the last gas pricing formula, we had committed to give some additional premium for gas produced in difficult areas (ultra-deep water and deep water). We will be publishing the premium formula shortly,” Pradhan told reporters on the sidelines of ‘Fourth National Convention: Oil & Gas India 2015’ organised by India-Tech foundation.

The premium will be given in new gas discoveries, he said adding that the government was considering new bidding rounds for oil and gas discoveries.

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Pradhan said the government has identified a few priority areas including getting more overseas investment in the sector, getting equity oil from overseas assets and focusing on energy conservation.

“At a time when oil prices are going down, we need to come out with an appropriate policy for oil and gas exploration and production. By the end of the current financial year, we will prepare documents for the next round of major assets bidding process for discovered marginal fields,” he said.

Commenting on falling oil prices, Pradhan said, “Gone are the days when only OPEC countries could dictate the prices of crude. Now, with developments in science, technology and innovations, nonOPEC countries are also emerging strongly. There are views that crude prices could stay below $40. India needs to convert this challenge into an opportunity.”

GAIL in talks with Iran to revive decade-old $22 billion LNG deal

By PTI | 24 Aug, 2015, 04.46AM IST GAIL India Ltd has begun talks with Iran to revive a decade-old $22 billion LNG supply contract, the cheapest deal ever struck by an Indian firm.

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NEW DELHI: State-run gas utility GAIL India Ltd has begun talks with Iran to revive a decade-old $22-billion LNG supply contract, the cheapest deal ever struck by an Indian firm.

Indian state firms had on June 13, 2005, signed a sale and purchase agreement (SPA) withNational Iranian Gas Export Company (NIGEC) for buying 5 million tonnes (mt) a year of LNG on a long-term contract at very attractive price of $3.215 per million British thermal unit. But Tehran never honoured the deal.

With prospects of sanctions against Iran being lifted after a nuclear accord it stuck with the US and other world powers, India has 48

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reopened dialogue on buying LNG from the Persian Gulf nation.

"Dialogue has been initiated with Iranian counterparts to revive the LNG supply longterm SPA," GAIL said in its latest annual report. In the contract, GAIL had signed to buy 2 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of LNG from NIGEC while refiner Indian Oil Corp (IOC) had signed for 1.75 mt.

Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd ( BPCL) was to take another 1.25 mt.

"Iran has so far not responded to the offer," a GAIL official said.

"There is a half-finished LNG export terminal in Iran which will have to be completed before any export of LNG can begin from Iran." The 2005 deal, he said, was an extremely attractive deal with price linked to Brent crude oil price with a floor of $10 per barrel and a ceiling of $31 a barrel.

Cairn India seeks to swap crude for higher margins BS, Aug16, 2015 Cairn India Ltd has proposed a swap deal to skirt an oil export ban, by selling its high-way Rajasthan crude oil to foreign firms at higher rates and in return supplying an equivalent quantity of oil.

The nation's biggest onshore crude oil producer wants the government to allow refiners like those based in Singapore and Japanese utilities interested in high-wax crude to pick up the Rajasthan crude and replenish the exported volume with no loss to any of the parties.

Sources close to the company said Cairn India has sought government approval for a tripartite agreement wherein Barmer crude oil will go to the international market where it will get better price than the ones realised locally.

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The firm getting access to low-sulfur crude oil will supply equivalent quality of crude oil to Indian refiners.

Shipping the Rajasthan oil to customers who are best equipped to process the low-sulfur crude will help Cairn India get a premium versus a 10-12 per cent discount on Brent prices that local refiners, including Indian Oil Corp (IOC), Essar Oil and Reliance Industries, currently pay.

Cairn India had previously sought approval to export the oil but the government had rejected it as the nation is 80 per cent import dependent to meet its oil needs.

Sources said the company now says it is not seeking a permission for exports but only a swap arrangement.

The three-way deal would essentially mean Cairn India will export Rajasthan oil but the deficit at its local customer will be made up by sourcing the commodity from an overseas supplier.

Sources said the company believes the pricing of Barmer crude oil at a discount to Brent has led to USD 1.94 billion loss to all stakeholders, including the government, on over 282 million barrels of oil produced since 2009.

Most Indian refineries are designed to process cheaper, high-sulfur crude, while that produced from the Rajasthan fields has low sulfur content.

The unique nature of the Barmer crude makes it difficult to optimise it in Indian refineries and so the crude is being sold at a discount.

The government had in September 2009 designated PSU refineries to buy the Rajasthan crude at a provisional pricing formula. A discount was provided as an initial incentive.

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Since the PSU refineries were not able to leave the allocated quantity of crude oil allocated to them, the government allowed Cairn the freedom to sell remaining quantity to domestic private refineries.

At present, Essar and RIL buy bulk of 170,000 barrels per day of output from Rajasthan.

With crude flow changing direction towards Asia, it’s a buyer’s market: B Ashok, Chairman, IOC NEW DELHI, JULY 28: India, which sources 85 per cent of its crude oil supplies from OPEC member countries, wants producers to offer discounts rather than charge a premium, as today it has become buyer’s market.

Demand-supply equation B Ashok, Chairman of country’s largest public sector oil refining-cumretailing entity Indian Oil Corporation, said: “The dynamics of business have changed. It is no longer a supplier’s market, but it is a buyer’s market. Today we (Asian refiners) should get a discount rather than paying a premium.”

Ashok told BusinessLine that the direction of crude flow from West Asia has now shifted to Asia. Besides, with OPEC deciding not to reduce production, there is a tilt in the demand-supply balance.

Crude import

India’s total crude oil import from all sources (including OPEC) stood ₹6,87 at 189.4 million tonne in 2014-15 worth $112.7 billion ( crore), while during April-May 2015-16, the imports were 48.2 million tonne costing $20.2 billion ( ₹1, 2 from contract to contract but it was $4-5 a barrel.

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Earlier, crude flow was from West Asia to North America and the pricing also depended on the market. Now, with the shale revolution, the flow has shifted to Asia.

Also, as the American and European markets have got multiple sources, the price is determined on the basis of that. For Asian markets, with no big producers, the proximity to West Asia made it the determining factor, Ashok explained. “…there could have been times when price for the Asian markets was probably a little more than the North American or European markets, which was typically called the Asian Premium.

“But since the flows have now changed, we are observing in the last few months that the prices we seem to be getting are better than the other markets,” he pointed out. At the recent OPEC meeting in Vienna, Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, while pointing to the shift in market dynamics, had said there is an urgent need to correct the price mechanism.

India’s stand Pradhan had said that there was a strong feeling that countries like India should get an Asian dividend rather than having to pay an Asian premium for bulk purchases.

“I will not hesitate to say that the Asian Premium was historically never justified and so not justifiable in the changed market scenario where Asian countries are the major buyers.

“Any measure that erodes the advantage of geography for Asian countries and promotes a policy of subsidising oil traffic to distant destinations is not, and cannot be, in the interest of sustainable development,” he said.

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ONGC Videsh Shortlisted for Mexican Oil Bid Round: Report Press Trust of India | Last Updated: August 23, 2015 18:05 (IST) New Delhi: ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) is among over a dozen international oil companies shortlisted to bid for Mexico's second round of bidding for offshore oil exploration blocks.

OVL, the overseas investment arm of state-owned Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), will compete with global majors Chevron, Shell, Statoil of Norway, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Russia's Lukoil, among others, for five shallow water productionsharing contracts covering nine Gulf of Mexico fields.

According to Mexico's National Hydrocarbons Commission, 14 bidders have been pre-qualified for the second phase of the Round One tender, the country's first licensing round in 88 years.

In the first phase bidding last month, OVL bid for two out of the 14 shallow water areas offered but the bids were rejected as they were below the floor for share of profit that ranged from 25 per cent to 40 per cent.

The company was the sole bidder for Area 6 and 12 but the bid was "rejected as it was considered too low", Mexico's National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH) said.

CNH said five consortia and nine individual companies have been shortlisted for the second of the five planned bidding phases, which starts on September 30. It had pre-qualified 26 bidders for the first phase, but only seven ended up placing offers.

Besides OVL, the individual companies pre-qualified for the five shallow-water blocks are Chevron, Shell, Statoil, CNOOC of China,

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Lukoil, Spain's Cespa, Germany's Dea Deutsche and Plains Acquisition Corporation of the US. The consortia shortlisted include Mexico's Sierra Oil and Gas and the Houston-based Talos Energy, which won the only two blocks awarded in the first phase, and are joined in the second phase by Grupo Carso, owned by Mexican magnate Carlos Slim.

Other consortia include Argentina's Pan American Energy and E&P Hidrocarburos y Servicios, Italy's Eni with Houston-based Casa Exploration, Malaysian state player Petronas and Portugal's Galp, as well as the US' Fieldwood with Mexico's Petrobal, according to CNH. Two blocks in phase one were won by Mexican company Sierra Oil & Gas in a consortium with Houston-based Talos Energy LLC and UK's Premier Oil PLC, which offered to pay the government 55.99 per cent of the operating profit from the first block and 68.99 per cent from the second.

Winning bids were determined by the highest amount of operating profit to be shared with the government, and the amount of investment pledged above the required minimum.

Indian Oil plans $3B petrochemicals project in Iran 31 August 2015 A natural gas-fed petrochemicals plant will allow Indian Oil to diversify from its existing projects that use oil products from its own refineries, the people said.

By DEBJIT CHAKRABORTY, RAJESH KUMAR SINGH and ABHISHEK SHANKER Indian Oil Corp. is seeking to build a $3 billion petrochemicals plant in Iran, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Shares rose.

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The plan hinges on assurances from Iran that the 1-million tpy project will have access to cheap natural gas as feedstock, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. A company spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment by phone, text message and e-mail.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is eyeing energy and infrastructure investments totaling billions of dollars in Iran, including upstream gas production and port developments. India has sought to secure ties with Iran and ensure access to its abundant hydrocarbons as years of sanctions on the Persian Gulf nation may be nearing an end.

Economic and financial restrictions on Iran, once the second-biggest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), left it in need of outside money and expertise to rejuvenate its flagging hydrocarbon industry.

Indian companies will be competing against state-run energy giants of regional rival China, as well as oil majors including Royal Dutch Shell and Total, if Iran’s breakthrough nuclear deal this year holds and sanctions are lifted.

Indian Oil, the biggest oil refiner in India, is betting on petrochemicals to drive growth. The company plans to spend $4.5 billion in the next few years to expand the business, according to its website.

Tremendous Potential A natural gas-fed petrochemicals plant will allow Indian Oil to diversify from its existing projects that use oil products from its own refineries, the people said.

Petrochemicals accounted for 4.4% of the the company’s revenues in the year ended March 31, while accounting for almost 39% of its operating income.

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Indian Oil sees “tremendous potential” in the industry, chairman B. Ashok said in an interview published in its latest in-house newsletter.

Iran and India are planning mutual energy investments, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said earlier this month in New Delhi. The Iranians won’t forget India’s support during the hard times, he said.

US President Barack Obama on Sunday won the support of another Senate Democrat for his Iran nuclear deal, putting the agreement three votes short of becoming veto-proof.

ONGC, partners to invest $24b in Mozambique gas field

By PTI Aug 30 2015 , New Delhi Tags: Petroleum, Oil and gas Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and its partners will invest about $24 billion in producing natural gas from a giant field off Mozambique and converting it into liquid fuel (LNG) for export by ships to consumers like India.

ONGC Videsh Ltd, the overseas investment arm of the state-run explorer, holds 16 per cent stake in Rovuma Area 1 where recoverable resources in excess of 75 trillion cubic feet have been established.

BPCL holds another 10 per cent and Oil India Ltd 4 per cent stake in the field and all three together hold more stake than operator Anadarko of the US (26.5 per cent).

"The Mozambique government has passed a decree law, paving way for start of construction work on the project. An estimated USD 23-24 billion will be required to bring first set of discoveries in Rovuma Area-

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1 on to production and convert that gas into LNG," a senior official in the consortium said.

The partners have so far committed USD 16 billion and hope to achieve financial closure of the remaining by December or early January, he said.

They are planning to produce first gas from Q1 of 2020. The gas will be turned into liquefied natural gas (LNG) at an onshore liquefication plant and exported in cryogenic ships to consumption centres like India.

Initial plan of development of Area-1 envisage developing two LNG trains of about 6 million tonnes per annum each from the GolfinhoAtum Field in Area-1.

"The decree law essentially means that the cost of bringing the gas field to production as well as building of liquefaction (LNG) plant will be cost recoverable i.E. All investments will be recouped from sale of gas first before profits are shared with Mozambique government," he said.

The project will have an ultimate capacity to produce 20 million tonnes of LNG annually and will be the world's largest LNG export site after ExxonMobil-run Ras Laffan in Qatar.

Rovuma Area-1 Offshore Mozambique Block (Block Area 1) is located along the coasts of northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania in the Indian Ocean. It has a total area of more than 10,000 square kilometers in water depths ranging from 900 metres to 1,600 metres and about 30-60 kms from shore.

Woodlands, Texas-based energy-exploration company Anadarko is the operator of the block with 26.5 per cent stake while other partners include Mitsui (20 per cent), ENH (15 per cent) and PTTEP (8.5 per cent).

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So far, seven gas fields have been discovered in the block. Of these, three fields -- Lagosta, Windjammer and Barquentine (collectively called the Prosperidade field) -- extend into the adjacent Block Area-4 where Italy's ENI with a 70 per stake is the operator.

The others -- Atum, Golfinho and a small field Tubarao -- are independent fields lying fully in Block Area-1.

The official said the consortium is looking at developing the independent fields first.

Oil companies slash jet fuel price by 11.7%

By PTI Sep 01 2015 , New Delhi Tags: Jet Fuel, Petroleum, Oil and gas ATF or jet fuel price was today slashed by a steep 11.7 per cent while rates of non-subsidised cooking gas LPG were reduced by Rs 25.5 per cylinder in line with dip in international prices.

Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) price in Delhi was cut by Rs 5,469.12 per kilolitre (kl), or 11.7 per cent, to Rs 40,938.24 per kl, oil companies announced today.

This is one of the steepest reductions, the biggest being a cut of Rs 7,520 per kl, or 12.5 per cent, on January 1.

Prior to today's reduction, jet fuel rate was cut by 9.4 per cent to Rs 46,407.36 on August 1 and by Rs 2,086.56 per kl to Rs 51,267.36 on July 1.

ATF, just as fuel in aeroplanes, today costs 33 per cent less than petrol that drives two-wheelers and cars. After a Rs 2 per litre cut effected from today, petrol in Delhi costs Rs 61.20 per litre as compared to jet fuel rate of Rs 40.93 a litre.

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Higher rates of petrol is primarily due to central and local sales taxes Rs 17.46 - on account of excise duty and Rs 12.25 because of sales tax or VAT. Rates vary at different airports because of differential in local sales tax or value-added tax (VAT).

Jet fuel constitutes over 40 per cent of an airline's operating costs and the price cut will reduce the financial burden on cash-strapped carriers.

No immediate comment was available from airlines on the impact of price reduction on passenger fares.

Simultaneously, the oil firms have also cut prices of non- subsidised LPG, which consumers buy after exhausting their quota of subsidised cooking fuel, by Rs 25.50 per 14.2-kg bottle.

Non-subsidised cooking gas (LPG) price in Delhi has been cut to Rs 559.50 per cylinder as compared to Rs 585 previously.

This is the third reduction in rates in as many months. Non-subsidised LPG rates were last cut by Rs 23.50 on August 1. Prior to that, rates were cut by Rs 18 per cylinder to Rs 608.50 on July 1.

Non-subsidised or market-priced LPG is one that consumers buy after exhausting their quota of 12 bottles of 14.2-kg each at subsidised rates in a year.

Subsidised LPG costs Rs 417.82 per 14.2-kg cylinder in Delhi.

The three fuel retailers - IOC, Hindustan Petroleum and Bharat Petroleum - revise jet fuel prices and non-subsidised LPG rates on the first day of every month, based on the average international price in the preceding month.

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GlobeScan

Rebels set Aden refinery ablaze in attack 07.14.2015 | The missile attack that hit the refinery, which is controlled by progovernment fighters, set off a “very serious” blaze that may reach another 100 storage tanks holding 1.2 million tons of oil and fuels.

By MOHAMMED HATEM An attack by Yemeni Houthi rebels on an oil refinery in the port city of Aden has sparked a fire at a storage tank that may spread, threatening supplies, said Naser Shaif, a spokesman for the Aden Oil Refinery Co. The missile attack that hit the refinery, which is under the control of pro-government fighters, on Monday set off a “very serious” blaze that may reach another 100 storage tanks holding 1.2 million tons of oil and fuels, Shaif said by phone.

A coalition led by Saudi Arabia has been conducting air strikes in Yemen targeting the Shiite rebels since March after the group ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

While the Saudi military intervention in the conflict hasn’t succeeded in reversing gains by the rebels, who control the capital, Sana’a, the government-in-exile has allied with fighters in Aden.

Months of fighting have led to fuel, food and medicine shortages and the warring parties agreed on a week long cease-fire from July 10 to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid. The truce has failed to hold.

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Marcellus to become a net exporter of natural gas this year September 1, 2015 Natural gas production is expected to slow this month for the first time across the country as drillers struggle against low commodity prices and oversupply.

Even so, states in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays spanning Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio are expected to still produce more gas than they can use and export the fuel out of the region.

“We are anticipating that the Northeast will be a net exporter for the average of 2015,” said Anne Swedberg, senior energy analyst for Denver-based Bentek Energy. “We are already seeing volumes leave the region this summer.”

The rest of the country is expected to catch up later, becoming a net exporter by 2017.

Now, most Marcellus gas is going to the Midwest, the Southeast and Canada. Eventually it will have access to Mexico through pipelines and globally through liquefied natural gas exports.

Through 2017, there will be about 3.4 Bcf/d of capacity additions on two major interstate pipelines, Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline and Spectra Energy’s Texas Eastern Transmission.

In terms of global markets, a bevy of projects are in the works to export liquefied natural gas. The closest such facility, Dominion Resource’s Cove Point project in Maryland, will be able to ship 0.7 Bcf/d of LNG overseas starting in late 2017. Late this year, Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass will begin shipping LNG from the Gulf Coast.

The Marcellus reached a record high of 20.4 Bcf/d on Aug. 24, according to Bentek estimates, “which puts it in line with Texas,” Ms. Swedberg said. In 2010, the region produced about 2 Bcf/d.

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That record high may be due to the completion of pipeline maintenance in the area, allowing more gas to be shipped from the wellhead, the U.S. Energy Information Administration noted.

The Marcellus and the deeper Utica formation drive much of U.S. production. The Marcellus alone accounted for 21 percent of the country’s natural gas production in the first five months of 2015, according to the EIA. Meanwhile, abundant gas without enough pipelines to ship it means prices in the Northeast continue to trade below the national benchmark, Henry Hub, prompting energy firms to slow their drilling plans.

On Friday, Henry Hub traded at $2.70. Meanwhile, the Dominion South spot price in southwestern Pennsylvania clocked in at $1.17 and Leidy Hub in northcentral Pennsylvania didn’t crack a dollar at 92 cents.

For instance, in August, State College-based Rex Energy is planning to sell assets and partner up with other companies to develop its remaining acreage as it hopes to weather the downturn in the oil and gas sector. The company also plans to continue to drill with a single rig through 2016.

The lack of infrastructure has lead to a huge backlog of wells that will drive production growth, even as drillers scale back.

“There are about 2,300 wells in the inventory, representing about 14 Bcf/d of trapped production,” Ms. Swedberg said on a webcast on Aug. 19.

“When we look at that backlog well inventory, we expect production to grow through 2017 due to people bring those wells into the system,” she said.

In November, infrastructure projects should bring about 3.9 Bcf/d of new capacity to the Northeast, with production forecasted to grow about 3.4 Bcf/d at that time, according to Bentek.

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In the short-term, gas production from the seven major shale regions is expected to slip for the first time.

Shale production reached a high in May of 45.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) and is expected to drop to 44.9 Bcf/d in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“In each region, production of new wells is not large enough to offset production declines from existing, legacy wells,” the EIA said.

In the Marcellus, natural gas production is expected to drop by 60 million cubic feet per day between August and September.

Stephanie Ritenbaugh: sritenbaugh@post-gazette.com or 412-2634910.

Iran to target more petrochemical exports: report 01 September 2015 Iran may also increase petrochemical output, creating a potential for increased exports and lower prices, Gracia said. Iran has the world’s biggest natural gas reserves, according to BP data.

By ANTHONY DiPAOLA Bloomberg The Americas will take the brunt of any cuts in oil production as Iran increases output once international sanctions are lifted, according to a report by A.T. Kearney’s oil and gas consulting practice in Dubai.

North, South and Central American oil production could fall 1.1 million bpd by 2020 because of higher costs as Iran’s output climbs, starting with an increase of 800,000 bpd next year, Chicago-based A.T. Kearney said in a report to be issued this week. Brent crude prices are seen trading at $45 to $65/bbl next year, according to the report.

The international benchmark was trading at $52.85/bb on Tuesday.

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“With Iran coming back on, there’s the prospect this is going to be a longer-term lower price than we’ve seen before,” Richard Forrest, A.T. Kearney’s lead partner for energy, said in an interview in Dubai on Sunday. “If you look at where the production comes out, it’s North American shale and it’s offshore.”

Iran is preparing to double output after international sanctions end, bringing as much as 1 million bpd of new supply into the market. In the US, crude production fell as New York oil prices dropped almost 50% in the past year on a glut. The US government on Monday said June production fell to 9.3 million bpd, the lowest since January.

Foreign Investment Iran could boost production by as much as 800,000 bpd in 2016, said Eduard Gracia, a principal at A.T. Kearney and co-author of the report. A.T. Kearney assumes Iran can boost output by an average of 6%/year from now until 2020 as long at it attracts foreign investment to help develop its fields.

That pace would put Iran’s output of crude and condensate at 4.955 million bpd in 2020, or an increase of about 1.5 million bbl from today, according to A.T. Kearney.

Wood Mackenzie says gasoline surplus after 2017 likely to reverse refinery fortunes London (Platts)--24 Aug 2015 738 am EDT/1138 GMT A surplus of gasoline supply globally as early as 2017 is likely to put "significant pressure on refiners by the end of the decade," and bring an end to the current healthy margins, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie's latest long-term oil product market forecast.

By 2019, gasoline cracks and margins could weaken to levels seen in 2013 and 2014.

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"Although gasoline cracks have been very strong this year, we could see a complete reversal in the market in just two years," Jonathan Leitch, a research director for oil product markets research, said in a statement.

As a result of the low crude costs, unexpected outages and "slower than expected ramp-up of new facilities in the Middle East," refineries had been enjoying healthy margins recently.

"The outlook for 2016 remains similar and in many ways stable, but in 2020 we start to see a glut of gasoline supply developing -- in excess of 30 million tons - which doesn't go away for a decade," Leitch added.

The ramp-up of three new refineries in the Middle East, which will add a total of 1.2 million b/d in capacity, coupled with stabilization of operations in Venezuela and ongoing investments can lead to prolonged period of oversupply, Wood Mac added.

According to Wood Mac's analysis, which tracks 745 operational refineries globally, gasoline yields are expected to increase by 1% over the next 15 year.

But while at present refiners are struggling to meet the gasoline demand growth of around 420,000 b/d, demand growth will slow down due to increased efficiency and alternative fuel sources.

By 2019, margins could bottom out "at minimum sustainable levels for Europe and Asia," Leitch said.

As a result, Leitch expects further capacity consolidation in Europe and Asia, and challenges for the US refining sector "particularly in areas without access to ex

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Chambroad Commissions First Propylene and Isobutylene Coproduction Plant In China Using Honeywell Uop Technology Honeywell Press Release First of three facilities in China that produce both propylene and isobutylene in a single dehydrogenation unit starts up, helping meet growing demand for fuels and petrochemicals DES PLAINES, Ill., Aug. 13, 2015– UOP LLC, a Honeywell (NYSE: HON) company, announced today that Shandong Chambroad Holding Co., Ltd. has become the first company in China to commission a combined C3/C4 dehydrogenation unit to meet growing demand in Asia for plastics, high-octane gasoline and synthetic rubber.

The new unit, which is the first of three in China, uses Honeywell UOP’s C3/C4 Oleflex™ process technology to produce propylene, a building block for making plastics, packaging and synthetic fiber, and isobutylene, a component used for high-octane gasoline and synthetic rubber. The unit, which is only the second of its kind in the world, successfully started up in May and all production targets have been accepted. Two other Chinese producers have also licensed the technology for start up in 2017.

“As the demand for transportation fuels and petrochemicals continues to grow in China, petrochemical companies there see a real benefit from integrating processes,” said Mike Millard, vice president and general manager of Honeywell UOP’s Process Technology and Equipment business. “The start up of the first combined C3/C4 Oleflex unit in China is a milestone in the region’s petrochemical production, and it will help Chambroad manage market conditions more efficiently.”

China consumes more than 15 percent of the world’s propylene and its demand is growing more than 4 percent per year, according to the

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U.S. Energy Information Administration. At the same time, gasoline demand is expected to grow in China as a result of a growing middle class and higher car sales. Honeywell UOP’s C3/C4 Oleflex technology uses catalytic dehydrogenation to convert propane to propylene and isobutane to isobutylene. Using mixed dehydrogenation, the processes are combined to produce both materials in a single unit. The technology is proven to have the lowest cash cost of production and the highest return on investment compared with competing technologies. Located in Binzhou City, Shandong Province, the new unit will produce 116,000 metric tonnes per year of propylene and 104,000 metric tonnes per year of isobutylene.

Honeywell UOP’s C3/C4 Oleflex technology has also been licensed by two other Chinese producers. Dongming Petrochemical Group will produce 265,000 metric tonnes per year of propylene and isobutylene, and Dongying Liyuan will produce 220,000 metric tonnes per year of propylene and isobutylene using the process. Both facilities also will use Honeywell UOP’s Butamer™ process, which converts normal butane into isobutane to increase feedstock flexibility for the Oleflex process.

Shandong Chambroad selected Oleflex technology over other processes due to the superior economics, proven reliability and successful track record of other Honeywell UOP dehydrogenation units in operation. Honeywell UOP has licensed the only two C3/C4 dehydrogenation units operating in the world today.

Shangdong Chambroad Holding Co., Ltd. is a private enterprise that provides petrochemical processing, biochemical manufacturing and plant fiber production, among others. Dongying Liyuan is a subsidiary of the Shandong Wantong Petrochemical Group, which owns the largest oil and gas storage and transportation facilities in Dongying Port, China. Shandong Dongming Petrochemical Group is an integrated petrochemical and energy technology development company. It is one of the top 500 largest companies in China.

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Schlumberger-Cameron deal good for deepwater, bad for Houston Aug 26, 2015, Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/blog/drilling-down/2015/08/analyst-schlumbergercameron-deal-goodfor.html?ana=e_hstn_nrg&u=20584603604da3a2929c5ab4576ea3&t=1441254459

Analysts see Schlumberger Ltd.'s (NYSE: SLB) acquisition of Houston-based Cameron International Corp. (NYSE: CAM) as great news for the industry and Schlumberger's customers in particular, but it will inevitably cause some pain here in Houston as the integration progresses.

The hits to Houston are two-fold. First, the overlap of operational functions between two large corporate offices has traditionally resulted in job cuts because of redundancies. Secondly, in light of Schlumberger's impressive number of engineering employees in Houston — 2,113 according to LinkedIn — independent engineering contractors that have thrived on offshore and deepwater projects will be rendered less necessary to the combined entity, said Randall Grace, a partner responsible for energy investments at Houstonbased Chilton Capital Management.

It's too early to discuss job cuts, said Susan Ganz, spokeswoman for Schlumberger. However, Ganz said the two companies are complementary in certain aspects And yet, products, services and technologies generate revenue for the company. When cost-cutting measures take place at major energy companies, job functions that don't generate revenue are the first to be reviewed for cost efficiency, said Brian Newkirk, founder and managing partner of Search Group International, a staffing firm in Houston that has worked with many of those displaced by energy industry job cuts this year."The two companies are complementary in terms of technology, products and services. We believe there is very little overlap from a products, services or technology perspective," said Ganz in an email to the Houston Business Journal.

Those kinds of jobs might include information technology and accounting, said Newkirk. In IT functions, Cameron has 332 Houston employees, according to LinkedIn.

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LinkedIn offers only an approximation as individual users may have neglected to update their profile, affecting the employment numbers on company profile pages.

Despite the typical attrition that follows the combination of two large companies, this deal is a net positive for Schlumberger's customers and a step in the right direction for the industry overall, said Grace.

With Cameron's equipment in the folds, Schlumberger can essentially provide a fully integrated service from wellbore to subsea processing for its customers, which is going to greatly streamline operations and costs for customers, said Grace.

Typically, a subsea service and equipment company may have to contract several different independent contractors to execute the process on the customer's deepwater drilling structure. That means that the customer's costs are subject to the results of several different rate negotiations from the various contractors.

With Schlumberger essentially filling out its deepwater capabilities in acquiring Cameron, it can be a one-stop shop for customers, said Grace.

Beyond the immediate benefits to Schlumberger's customers, this kind of streamlining and standardization of processes and equipment are exactly what offshore oil and gas are in desperate need of.

"The deepwater markets, where Schlumberger's large integrated customers operate, are disadvantaged because they haven’t had the ability to reduce costs as quickly as the onshore shale guys have," said Grace.

A handful of executives lamented the unnecessary costs that get added into the building of deepwater rigs via overly complicated engineering processes at this year's IHS CERA Week in April.In June, soon-to-retire Cameron CEO Jack Moore told the Houston Business Journal that standardization was the key to offshore's adaptation.

"We’re also looking at standardizing solutions that aren’t reinventing the wheel. Standardization is a big buzzword, and everyone uses it," said Moore at the time.

"This transaction will help to standardize the process and reduce costs, benefitting customers," said Grace.

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TOP

TrendScan OPEC’s war on US shale oil: Midsummer update

By James Clad, The Hill, August 07, 2015, 06:00 am As we’ve fixated this summer on Greece and Syria, the global energy drama in play since mid-2014 has slipped from view. The epic price collision between foreign producers and the U.S. shale oil industry has entered a potentially pivotal round.

Since the mid-2000s, ever more plentiful North American shale oil has rattled OPEC’s lower-cost suppliers. Then, in June last year, the strongest and richest of the Persian Gulf suppliers decided to maintain rather than cut production, aiming to drive down global prices to give a hammer blow to U.S. shale producers, thereby preserving the cartel’s market share.

ADVERTISEMENT To date, the price war shows distinctly mixed results. One thing is clear: a by-the-numbers, textbook capitulation by U.S. producers to the 70-percent oil price fall simply hasn’t happened. Even the looming entry of more Iranian oil going into global markets – potentially by as much as 1 million barrels per day —needn’t sound shale’s death knell.

To date, very few shale oil firms have gone bankrupt. Instead, they’ve shed personnel, tightened operating budgets, driven tough new deals with subcontractors, and tweaked their extractive technologies to even higher yields. They’ve fine-tuned their financial, as well as their oil field, engineering.

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Using fewer than half the drilling rigs in use last year, U.S. firms are still delivering the same amount of oil to market, in the same quantities which the Persian Gulf monarchies find so threatening.

Cushioned by large forex reserves, the rich Persian Gulf producers ignore other OPEC members’ plea for higher export prices. Despite their own eroding fiscal position, the Saudis remain committed to keeping global prices low enough, and long enough, to cut sharply into US production – at which point new, scarcity-driven oil price rises will handsomely reward the Kingdom.

To be sure, the strategy has hit the US oil industry hard. Over 150,000 American oil industry workers lost their jobs this past year.

But the contest transcends both job numbers and weekly guessing games about shale oil’s latest ‘break-even point’. For shale producers, beneficial competitive consequences include wellhead innovation, new financing, restructuring (including M&A bids) and intra-industry consolidation.

Far from bowing to simple ‘price determinism’, the U.S. hydrocarbon industry’s familiarity with boom & bust cycles gives it the experience to ride out the storm. Lenders and investors remain in the picture, willing to finance, refinance, or take equity, all helped by low interest rates.

The goal of doing permanent damage to U.S. shale oil production thus seems out of reach. Despite the fiercely competitive environment, U.S. producers are proving a resilient foe.

The historian Arnold Toynbee described world history as a recurrent pattern of “challenge, and response,” a maxim applicable to U.S. oil production as well. And beyond the industry’s responsive efficiencies, other factors also portend its survival.

Export oil price falls have hit Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Angola hard. For these and other countries like them, empty state coffers portend alarming, systemic political risk raising market doubts over their own reliability as suppliers.

Geographical proximity to our own American end-users also aids the industry’s survival. U.S. shale oil reaches US refineries, transport networks, industrial hubs, and to manufacturers using oil as feedstock

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as well as fuel. These geographical advantages help to offset suppliers of less expensive but more distant oil.

The strengthening U.S. manufacturing renaissance rests in part on abundant domestic energy supplies. US shale oil producers will also gain from an inevitable disappearance of legal restrictions on U.S. crude oil exports, a legacy of the 1970s. The reconfiguring of American refineries, for cracking and processing domestic shale oil, will also boost domestic hydrocarbon competitiveness.

Meanwhile, the epic price war continues, pitting shale innovation against established cartel producers. The likely result: A tighter, leaner, merged and reconstituted shale industry emerging largely intact. Though much cannot be forecast, including the extent of future Iranian sales, these years – and this summer – could come to be seen as the moment when OPEC’s old style price manipulation paradoxically entrenched still further the very same innovation and efficiencies which spawned the shale oil challenge.

Clad is an international political risk consultant and was U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia Pacific Affairs from 2007-09.

Oil Explorers Boost U.S. Drilling Even as Price Slumps David Wethe, Bloomberg, August 21, 2015 Drillers added rigs in U.S. oilfields for the seventh time in the past eight weeks as declining crude prices fail to hold back activity.

Rigs targeting oil in the U.S. rose by 2 to 674 this week, the highest since the last week of April, Baker Hughes Inc. said on its website Friday. Drilling equipment added in the Williston Basin of North Dakota and other shale plays more than offset a declining count in areas like Texas’ Eagle Ford and Permian formations.

The crude being pumped out of shale rock in the U.S. has helped create a global glut that pushed prices in New York below $40 a barrel for the first time in more than six years on Friday. At such low prices, the recent drilling increase may be short-lived, and the rig count remains almost 60 percent lower than in October.

“We hit bottom, we bounced off the bottom a little bit, but we’re just sort of skating along the bottom,” James Williams, president energy 72

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consultancy WTRG Economics, said by phone from London, Arkansas. “With $40-a-barrel oil prices, two months from now we’re going to see another step down.”

The Williston added three oil rigs for a total of 73, while the Eagle Ford and Permian combined to lose eight.

West Texas Intermediate for October delivery dropped 69 cents, or 1.7 percent, to settle at $40.45 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It touched $39.86, the lowest level for a front-month contract since March 2009.

‘Conceivable Reality’ And it could get worse. Oil may fall to lows last seen during the global financial crisis amid a persistent supply surplus, Citigroup Inc. said on Aug. 19.

“Balances point to further oversupply throughout 2015, begging the question how low can oil go?” Citigroup analysts led by Seth Kleinman said in the report. The U.S. crude price of $32.40 a barrel reached in 2008 “is a conceivable reality.”

Oil moved into a bear market in July, with prices almost 35 percent down from this year’s highest close in June, and the biggest producers are preparing for an extended downturn.

Traders have been tracking the rig counts as they try to determine when U.S. oil production will fall enough to support higher prices. The use of new technology that helps drillers pump more with fewer rigs has made that task more difficult.

Crude output in the U.S. dropped by 47,000 barrels a day to 9.35 million last week, but remains almost 70 percent higher than four years ago, Energy Information Administration data show.

IEA Says Oil Prices May Fall Even Further Before Supply Fades in 2016 Grant Smith, Oil prices may fall further as the world remains “massively oversupplied,” before markets tighten in 2016 when output growth outside OPEC grinds to a halt, according to the International Energy Agency.

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There will be no overall production growth outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries next year for the first time since 2008, according to the IEA. Growth in U.S. shale oil supplies will stagnate to the middle of 2016 while output declines in Russia, the Paris-based adviser said in its first detailed assessment of the year ahead. Global oil demand growth will slow, the agency predicted.

Chart: International Energy Agency Oil-producing nations around the world are reeling after OPEC initiated a strategy in November to defend its share of global markets by pressuring rivals to curb output. Oil prices, about 45 percent lower than a year ago, may need to decline further to reduce the supply surplus, the IEA said.

“The bottom of the market may still be ahead,” said the agency, which advises 29 industrialized nations on energy policy. “Non-OPEC supply growth is expected to grind to a halt in 2016 as lower oil prices and spending cuts take a toll.”

Brent crude futures, a global benchmark, pared gains after the report.

The August contract traded 9 cents higher at $58.70 a barrel at 1:49 p.m. on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange, having earlier risen as much as $1.05. The grade has lost 13 percent from this year’s peak in May.

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U.S. Slows

Chart: International Energy Agency “In the short term, the report is definitely bearish” because of its assessment of a massive surplus, said Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. in London. The 2016 numbers are supportive of prices because of the “huge swing” in the trend of nonOPEC production growth, she said.

“Non-OPEC supply growth is expected to grind to a halt in 2016, as lower oil prices and spending cuts take a toll” U.S. production growth will slow to 300,000 barrels day next year from 900,000 a day in 2015, with gains in offshore production and supply of natural gas liquids. While “cost savings, efficiency gains and producer hedging” have helped shale drillers beat expectations so far, the nation’s boom can’t keep going at current prices, the agency said.

Chart: International Energy Agency The halt in non-OPEC growth projected for 2016 contrasts with an expansion of 1 million barrels day this year and a “massive” 2.4 million in 2014, the IEA said. Russia’s production will slip next year to 10.86 million barrels a day from 10.98 million, the agency forecast.

OPEC Strength The slowdown in supplies will increase reliance on OPEC in 2016, the IEA said. Production from the 12-nation group climbed to a three-year 75

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high of 31.7 million barrels a day in June as Iraq reached a record of more than 4 million a day and Saudi Arabia, the biggest member, added output.

That leaves total OPEC supplies about 1.4 million barrels a day higher than the average needed next year “and the group is not slowing down,” according to the IEA. This will potentially counteract the effect of weaker output elsewhere in rebalancing world markets, the agency said.

“The rebalancing that began when oil markets set off on an initial 60 percent price drop a year ago has yet to run its course,” according to the report. “Recent developments suggest that the process will extend well into 2016.”

Global oil demand growth will slow next year to 1.2 million barrels a day -- reaching 95.2 million a day -- down from an expansion of 1.4 million a day this year, according to the report. The increase in consumption peaked in the first quarter, temporarily boosted by an unusually cold European winter.

Gas industry’s war on the public

By Chris Saeger Kathleen Sgamma of the lobbying group Western Energy Alliance (WEA) published a piece in the Congress blog last week that misconstrued the facts on natural gas waste and its impact on American taxpayers. Echoing the same over the top rhetoric we’ve become accustomed to hearing from industry lobbyists, Sgamma asserted that common sense limits on natural gas waste somehow constitute a “war” on her industry.

But the truth is, an overwhelming majority of westerners support reasonable rules to put a stop to natural gas waste. A Western Values Project poll from last year found that upwards of 69 percent of voters in Colorado, New Mexico and Montana—a solid bipartisan majority—support a rule to address this problem, particularly on our nation’s public lands. The claims in Sgamma’s piece, however, appear to not only be out of touch with the will of a majority of Western voters, they also distort the reality of the problem at hand.

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To start, Sgamma presented an incomplete picture of natural gas emissions in America. She claims that emissions from natural gas have fallen while production has increased. What she failed to mention is that methane emissions from the processing, transmission, and storage stages—which are equally significant stages of natural gas extraction and generation—have all increased dramatically since 2005.

The real facts speak for themselves. Natural gas and petroleum systems account for at least 29 percent of natural gas waste and emissions. That number makes natural gas and petroleum the nation’s largest contributor, and beats out emissions from coal mining and landfillscombined.

WEA’s attacks on American leaders’ efforts to put a stop to the waste are particularly troubling given westerners’ widespread support for a possible rule from the Bureau of Land Management to end natural gas waste on America’s public lands. A huge portion of natural gas waste across the West is due to the wasteful practices of “venting” and “flaring” by oil companies that literally burn off our natural gas resources by venting or leaking them into the atmosphere.

On public lands companies vent, leak and flare our natural gas without paying a dime in royalties on these wasted resources to hardworking American taxpayers—the ones who are most affected by oil and gas development on public lands. A recent report found that, from 2006 to 2013, taxpayers lost out on over $380 million in royalties due to the wasteful practice of venting and flaring.

In 2013, the amount of gas leaked, flared, or vented, by WEA members alone, totaled an equivalent of $5 million in lost revenue for American taxpayers. Perhaps $5 million doesn’t sound like much compared to the absurd annual profits that oil companies haul in, but this figure becomes much more significant after assessing what $5 million represents for a state budget. $5 million would have allowed Colorado to add 155 new teachers in their public school systems. They didn’t. In New Mexico, 100 new police officers could have been hired with that money. They weren’t.

And in Montana, $5 million could have been used to pay 105 more firefighters to fight this summer’s devastating wildfires. But it wasn’t.

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Fortunately, some in the energy industry view the new compliances as an opportunity to promote innovation, increase jobs, and bring in higher profits. The Center for Methane Emissions Solutions (CMES) found that, every year, nearly $2 billion worth of methane is lost due to equipment problems and inefficient practices. CMES and its partner groups are working to find innovative solutions that cut down on methane waste, while at the same time increasing American jobs.

That’s why westerners are behind American leaders’ efforts to limit this waste, and look forward to a rule that the BLM is considering to put a stop to this waste on our public lands. Conservative estimates show that American taxpayers stand to lose $800 million over the next ten years without such a rule.

As Sgamma calls new compliance standards a “war on natural gas,” her members’ wasteful practices beg the question: Who’s really waging the war on natural gas? American leaders who want to protect our resources—in many cases, taxpayer-owned resources—or oil companies that are burning those resources without paying Americans a penny?

Saeger is director of the Western Values Project (WVP).

China slowdown, oversupply to keep crude prices under pressure

By Ritwik Mukherjee Aug 30 2015 Bearish global sentiments also set to weigh on any recovery in prices

Concerns about China slowdown drove global oil prices to multi-year lows earlier last week. As global crude oil prices plummeted to fresh six-year lows, the Indian basket also fell to $42.97 per barrel on last Monday from $45.21, as per official statistics. The Indian basket comprises 73 per cent sour-grade Dubai and Oman grade crude and the rest sweet-grade Brent. Indian crude basket fell to its lowest since

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December 2008 when the prices averaged $40.61 for the month, according to the government-run petroleum planning and analysis cell data. The Indian crude oil data comes with a lag of a day.

But after two days, that is, on Thursday, crude oil futures rallied, tracking the rise in global equity markets and fall in the US inventories. On the same day, benchmark Brent crude gained $1.45 on cues from rise in share prices globally. October Brent crude rose 3.23 per cent to $44.58 barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in October gained $1.25 a barrel to below $39.85 a barrel.

According to Emkay Commodity Research, crude oil prices have rebounded from its lows at 2,601 levels. “Immediate resistance for the counter is seen around 2,672-2,690 zones. Failure to break above these levels will see prices dip towards 2,600 levels again.

Sustenance above 2,700 will see prices rebound towards 2,760/2,780 levels. Overall trend though remains negative,” the Emkay Commodity report said.

On last Thursday, US crude rose $3.96, or 10.3 per cent, to $42.56 per barrel – its biggest one-day percentage gain since March 2009.

The sharp gain in crude prices was triggered by strong US economic data, which eased global growth fears. The US economy in the second quarter expanded at 3.7 per cent annual pace, instead of earlier estimates of 2.3 per cent. The next day, crude in Asian trading extended their gains. Front-month October Brent crude was up 44 cents, or nearly 1 per cent, at $48 per barrel.

But this rally failed to cheer up the analysts, who continued being skeptical and many analysts and traders felt that the recovery in commodity prices looks fragile with concerns over China’s growth still weighing on market activity.

“Global oversupply and seasonal weakness, rattled investor sentiment about the Chinese economy and that will be dominating 79

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factors in the near term. The market remains in oversupply with around 2.5 million barrels a day in excess of demand and the likelihood of more oil flowing from Iran, after the nuclear deal.

Stronger dollar, rising gasoline inventories as the summer season nears its end, coupled with bearish global market sentiments will exert downside pressure on oil prices,” said Angel Commodities, in its recent Crude Outlook.

Emkay Commodities, on its parts, said, “The outlook for crude oil will remain negative until prices stay below 2,700 levels. Intra-day rallies will face selling between 2,650 and 2,675 levels. A decisive break below 2,570 will see prices dip towards 2,500 levels. A near term reversal is likely only above 2,700 levels.”

There are others who think that China’s stock market sparked concern about the economic health of the world’s biggest energy consumer. Oil also came under pressure due to a sharp increase in the drilling activities in the US with data showing producers adding 21 rigs in the last week of July, the most in over a year, suggesting a ramp up in output. Combination of falling equities in China coupled with global glut weighed heavily on oil prices.

Meanwhile, in India the crude oil production declined 0.4 per cent to 3.134 million tonne in July against the same month of 2014, recording fall for second straight month. Crude oil output of the state-run ONGC fell 0.4 per cent to 1.881 million tonne, and of Oil India 6.7 per cent to 0.275 million tonne. The crude oil production of private and joint venture companies rose 1.6 per cent to 0.978 million tonne. ONGC’s offshore output improved 3.1 per cent to 1.381 million tonne, but onshore production continued to dip at 7.5 per cent to 0.473 million tonne.

Interestingly, India’s crude oil refinery output jumped 9 per cent to 18.947 million tonne in July this year over July 2014, showing acceleration in the pace of growth from 6.2 per cent recorded in June.

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Shale’s Answer to Low Oil Prices: Automation Upstream Intelligence Low oil price, fast production drop-off, constrained capex and a proliferation of isolated wells are behind the operator drive for costeffective onshore automation.

In a brand new whitepaper, Upstream Intelligence have collaborated with leading automation experts from Oxy, Halliburton, Schlumberger, Emerson and many more to determine how the low oil price is impacting operator automation strategy.

The paper will allow you to: • Leverage automation technology to enable the ability to operate by exception which will reduce downtime and enhance production data decision-making • Find out how to take a cost-effective approach to automation, considering data integration, standardization and workforce challenges • Assess the relationship between SCADA systems and Industrial Internet to anticipate future developments in capturing and unlocking valuable field data This white paper is sponsored by Upstream Intelligence.

Oil markets extend gains after biggest daily climb in 6 yrs Thu Aug 27, 2015 | SEOUL, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Crude oil futures rose on Friday, adding to their biggest one-day rally in over six years the day before led by recovering equity markets and news of diminished crude supplies.

U.S. crude futures are on track for their first weekly gains in 11 weeks, ending the longest losing streak since 1986. Brent crude is set for its first weekly gain in two weeks. * Recovering stock markets boost oil prices * U.S. crude on track for first weekly gain in 11 weeks 81

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* Brent set for first weekly rise for two weeks (Adds detail, updates prices)

By Meeyoung Cho and Aaron Sheldrick SEOUL, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Crude oil futures rose on Friday, adding to their biggest one-day rally in over six years the day before led by recovering equity markets and news of diminished crude supplies.

U.S. crude futures are on track for their first weekly gains in 11 weeks, ending the longest losing streak since 1986. Brent crude is set for its first weekly gain in two weeks.

Asian shares extended a global rally on Friday after upbeat U.S. economic data calmed sentiment, with Chinese stocks jumping for the second day following a rocky start to the week.

Front-month October Brent crude was up 11 cents at $47.67 per barrel as of 0257 GMT. It settled $4.42 higher at $47.56 per barrel in the previous session.

U.S. crude was 39 cents higher at $42.95 per barrel, after ending up $3.96 at $42.56 per barrel, its biggest one-day percentage gain since March 2009.

"A short covering rally, led by crude oil pushed commodities higher across the board. Better than expected U.S. GDP numbers was the main spark, although the force majeure on BP's exports from Nigeria extended the gains," ANZ said in a note on Friday.

"The recovery in commodity prices looks fragile with concerns over China's growth still weighing on market activity."

The U.S. economy grew faster than initially thought in the second quarter on solid domestic demand. Gross domestic product expanded at a 3.7 percent annual pace instead of the 2.3 percent rate reported last month, the Commerce Department said on Thursday in its second GDP estimate for the April-June period.

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Shell's Nigerian unit, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), declared force majeure on Bonny Light crude oil exports on Thursday after shutting down two key pipelines in the country due to a leak and theft.

China's falling auto sales have been at the forefront of concerns that its economy is slowing much faster than expected, weighing on oil prices.

"We have long held below consensus price forecasts for most commodities ... we have already made some downward revisions to key price forecasts in August, such as oil, and will be making further adjustments across metals, energy and agriculture," said BMI Research, part of the Fitch ratings agency.

Venezuela has been contacting other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), pushing for an emergency meeting with Russia to come up with a plan to stop the global oil price rout, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Japanese refiners eye cheaper Latin American oil 31 August 2015 Japanese refiners, which have traditionally favored cargoes from Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi for stability of supply, are boosting imports from other regions including Latin America.

By TSUYOSHI INAJIMA and EMI URABE Japan’s biggest refiner will opt for a “one-cent” saving on crude purchases, even if that means shipping from places other than the Middle East, a region it’s always depended on for stable supplies.

JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corp. is examining more samples of crude that have previously never been processed at its plants, according to Minoru Minegishi, a group manager at the company’s crude oil trading and shipping department. It’s becoming more price sensitive

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amid shrinking refining margins in Asia, with China accelerating fuel exports because of weak domestic demand.

“We now have a mindset that we should take cheaper crude even when it’s a one-cent difference,” Minegishi said. “We live in difficult times in terms of domestic and overseas competition.”

Japanese refiners, which have traditionally favored cargoes from Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi for stability of supply, are boosting imports from other regions including Latin America.

Their shipments of Mexican oil more than doubled to 812,619 kiloliters in the first half of 2015 from a year earlier, according to the Finance Ministry. China’s fuel exports are exerting “strong downwards pressure” on Asian refinery margins, Citigroup said Aug. 10.

Tokyo-based JX agreed to buy 6 million bbl of Isthmus crude from August and January 2016, according to Mexico’s state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. The Japanese refiner has already taken delivery of 4 million bbl over the first half of this year.

“We are more price sensitive than we were in the good old days,” Minegishi said.

The shale boom that’s driven US oil production to the highest level in more than three decades has reduced America’s need for imports, displacing crude from nations such as Mexico and Venezuela as benchmark prices plunged more than 50% over the past year.

That’s boosting cheaper South American deliveries to Asia, even as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) -including Saudi Arabia -- maintain output in a bid to defend market share.

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TechScan

BioSafe Safety Glasses Holder Terra Universal LISTED UNDER: Biological Safety Enclosures R&D headlines and news, Wed, 08/19/2015 Terra Universal has introduced a new addition to their special BioSafe product line, a hinged, easy-clean safety glasses holder. The container is designed for comfortable access to stored items, while maintaining stringent cleanliness standards and simplifying sanitation processes. Featuring a convenient hinged design, the mounted BioSafe holder swings out from the wall by releasing a simple catch.

Easily lift the holder out of the hinges for removal to access hard-toreach, sloped cubbies which can then be properly wiped down or steam cleaned to rid the compartments of particle accumulation.

Durable 304 stainless steel or polypropylene construction is compatible with your room’s cleanliness requirement. The safety glasses holder is available with 10, 24, 32 or 48 compartments, supporting a variety of storage solutions to fit your needs.

Terra Universal, www.terrauniversal.com

Pages with Nanoparticles Help Filter Water Fri, 08/21/2015 - 8:00pm Greg Watry, Digital Reporter Dankovich pours contaminated pond water into a funnel containing an antimicrobial filter paper to obtain clean drinking water in a rural area of Bangladesh. Image: Ali WilsonAs a graduate student, Theresa 85

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Dankovich was following in McGill Univ.’s pulp and paper research tradition when she developed a book, with pages capable of purifying water by killing waterborne bacteria through nanotechnology.

Her research was originally sponsored by Sentinel: Bioactive Paper Network, which aimed to design paper with antimicrobial effects for air and water filtration, among other uses.

“I have a copy of The Drinkable Book with me,” said Dankovich, now of Carnegie Mellon Univ., at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

“It looks like a regular book,” she said. As she flipped from the gray cover to the interior, she noted the consistency of the pages, bright orange and thick. In appearance, they resembled parchment. On the conference table was a silver-colored water vessel, with a conicalshaped piece of paper from The Drinkable Book in the opening.

According to Dankovich, purification is achieved when water passes through the silver- and copper-nanoparticle paper. Silver has long been known for its antibacterial effect. In 400 BC, Greek physician Hippocrates described its unique antibacterial property.

Though Daknovich started out with silver nanoparticles at McGill, she eventually added copper while she was continuing her research at the Univ. of Virginia’s Center for Global Health.

Field investigations followed, and she traveled to South Africa, Ghana, Haiti and Kenya.

“In Africa, we wanted to see if the filters would work on ‘real water,’ not water purposely contaminated in the lab,” she said. “One day, while we were filtering lightly contaminated water form an irrigation canal, nearby workers directed us to a ditch next to an elementary school, where raw sewage had been dumped. We found millions of bacteria.”

The Drinkable Book’s pages achieved 99.9% purity with the sample.

“Some silver and copper will leach from the nanoparticle-coated paper, but the amount lost into the water is within minimal values and well below the Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization drinking water limits for metals,” she said.

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In total, the pages have been tested on 25 different water sources in five countries, according topAge Drinking Paper, a nonprofit company started by Dankovich.

“People seem to be interested in the fact that it’s a very simple thing,” she said. “It’s not like it involves pumps, or you have to plug something in. It’s just pouring into a container.”

Scaling up production is one of Dankovich’s current goals, as most of the pages she’s made by herself, or in the oven of a church kitchen.

The oven is used in a heat treatment step in the paper’s production.

According to the nonprofit, Dankovich has created enough pages for five books, which took over 60 hrs of work.

Further, she wants to design an indicator system to let users know when to replace the paper.

New catalyst may hasten commercialization of fuel cell vehicles Vic Comello, Argonne National Laboratory R&D headlines and news , Thu, 08/27/2015 – Scientists at Argonne National Lab have developed a new fuel cell catalyst using earthly abundant materials with performance that is comparable to platinum in laboratory tests.

If commercially viable, the new catalyst could replace platinum in electric cars powered by fuel cells instead of batteries, which would greatly extend the range of electric vehicles and eliminate the need for recharging. This figure shows the microstructural difference between conventional catalysts and the new reduced-platinum catalyst. Image: Di-Jia LiuScientists at the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)'s Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new fuel cell 87

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catalyst using earthly abundant materials with performance that is comparable to platinum in laboratory tests. If commercially viable, the new catalyst could replace platinum in electric cars powered by fuel cells instead of batteries, which would greatly extend the range of electric vehicles and eliminate the need for recharging.

Fuel cells generate electricity by using hydrogen from a fuel tank with oxygen in the air. The only waste product emitted to the environment is water.

But fuel cells are expensive, largely because they depend on the precious metal platinum to cause the hydrogen-oxygen reaction.

Argonne's fuel cell catalyst replaces much of the platinum with a nonprecious metal. “Platinum represents about 50% of the cost of a fuel cell stack, so replacing or reducing platinum is essential to lowering the price of fuel cell vehicles,� said Di-Jia Liu, who led the Argonne team. Their catalyst replaces all the platinum in the fuel cell's cathode, which usually requires four times as much platinum as the anode, and their new electrode design also optimizes the flow of protons and electrons within the fuel cell and the removal of water.

Many automakers see sales of vehicles powered by fuel cells as eventually outpacing battery-powered electric vehicles for several reasons: fuel-cell vehicles emit only water, can travel over 300 miles between fill ups, can be refilled quickly and place no burden on the electrical grid because they don't need recharging.

Since both technologies lack refilling or recharging infrastructures and are expensive, both are currently suitable mainly for early adopters and use in corporate fleets. But this may change, if advances made

by Argonne researchers can be realized in commercial fuel-cell vehicles.

Fuel cells generate electricity to propel vehicles through electrochemical reactions between onboard hydrogen fuel and oxygen in the air. Hydrogen molecules are stripped of electrons at the fuel cell's anode, becoming protons that travel through a polymer

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electrolyte membrane to the cathode, where they react with electrons and oxygen to form water.

“In order for a fuel cell to work,” Liu explained, “the catalyst must be densely packed with active sites that are uniformly distributed throughout the cathode and directly connected to the arriving protons and electrons, while maintaining easy access to oxygen. The catalyst should also have an architecture that can readily channel away the produced water.” No conventional method for preparing carbon-based platinum or non-precious metal catalysts can meet all these criteria, Liu added.

In a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the team led

by Liu reported on a new method of synthesizing a highly efficient, nanofibrous non-precious metal catalyst by electrospinning a polymer solution containing a mixture of ferrous organometallics and metalorganic frameworks. Following thermal activation, the new catalyst delivered an unprecedented level of catalytic activity in actual fuel cell tests.

“The new catalyst offers a unique carbon nano-network architecture made of microporous nanofibers interconnected through a macroporous framework,” Liu explained. “Not only do the active sites inside the micropores within individual fibers catalyze chemical reactions effectively, but the macroporous voids between the fibers transport oxygen and water efficiently to and from the active sites.

The continuous nano-networks also make the catalytic electrode highly conductive in charge transfer.”

Source: Argonne National Laboratory

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New fire extinguisher: Bass hum booms flames out

By Ben Brumfield, CNN Two engineering students developed a fire extinguisher that works with sound waves. Photo by Evan Cantwell /George Mason University (CNN)Boom out da fi-ya!

Bass out da flames!

Firefighters may be snuffing blazes with deep-toned sound, if a new device invented by two engineering students in Fairfax, Virginia, catches on.

Viet Tran and Seth Robertson's new fire extinguisher looks a little like a conventional one, but instead of a compressed air tank spewing out chemicals, theirs has a loudspeaker the size of subwoofer drumming out sound waves.

It's not much to listen to, just a low hum, but when pointed at flames, it makes them vanish.

In a way, it's like blowing the fire out, because sound waves are basically multiple, regular blasts of air.

When they started out, Tran and Robertson thought high-pitched tones would do the trick. It didn't work.

"It's low-frequency sounds -- like the thump-thump bass in hip-hop that works," Tran said.

No mess, no smell With water, powder, foam and chemicals, there are already many means of dousing a flame, so it may be hard to imagine what sense it makes to add a new one.

But putting out a blaze usually leaves behind a big mess -- chemical residue in every cranny, or gushing water that ruins what flames failed to devour.

Sound waves are much cleaner.

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Tran envisions the new extinguishers starting out small, perhaps mounted over stovetops to put out grease fires. Or astronauts could deploy them.

"In space, extinguisher contents spread all over. But you can direct sound waves without gravity," Robertson said.

Thought they'd flunk Robertson and Tran appear to have beaten a defense agency to the punch, according to George Mason University, where the two developed the extinguisher as a sort of senior year final exam.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has run experiments on blasting out fire with sound but don't appear to have developed something as handy as an extinguisher.

But when they started out, Tran and Robertson's idea scared off classmates, who though it was a sure ticket to an F. Professors were leery of supporting them.

Then Professor Brian Mark agreed to mentor them, though he first thought the project would fail. "Some students take the safe path, but Viet and Seth took the higher-risk option," he said.

Now, the university is helping the two apply for a provisional patent.

Artificial leaf harnesses sunlight for efficient production

fuel

Jessica Stoller-Conrad, Caltech, R&D headlines and news, Fri, 08/28/2015 Generating and storing renewable energy, such as solar or wind power, is a key barrier to a clean-energy economy. When the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) was established at Caltech and its partnering institutions in 2010, the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub had one main goal: a costeffective method of producing fuels using only sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, mimicking the natural process of photosynthesis in plants and storing energy in the form of chemical fuels for use on demand. Over the past five years, researchers at JCAP have made major advances toward this goal, and they now report the 91

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development of the first complete, efficient, safe, integrated solardriven system for splitting water to create hydrogen fuels.

"This result was a stretch project milestone for the entire five years of JCAP as a whole, and not only have we achieved this goal, we also achieved it on time and on budget," says Caltech's Nate Lewis, George L. Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry, and the JCAP scientific director.

The new solar fuel generation system, or artificial leaf, is described online in Energy and Environmental Science. The work was done by researchers in the laboratories of Lewis and Harry Atwater, director of JCAP and Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science.

"This accomplishment drew on the knowledge, insights and capabilities of JCAP, which illustrates what can be achieved in a Hubscale effort by an integrated team," Atwater says. "The device reported here grew out of a multi-year, large-scale effort to define the design and materials components needed for an integrated solar fuels generator."

The new system consists of three main components: two electrodes—one photoanode and one photocathode—and a membrane. The photoanode uses sunlight to oxidize water molecules, generating protons and electrons as well as oxygen gas.

The photocathode recombines the protons and electrons to form hydrogen gas. A key part of the JCAP design is the plastic membrane, which keeps the oxygen and hydrogen gases separate. If the two gases are allowed to mix and are accidentally ignited, an explosion can occur; the membrane lets the hydrogen fuel be separately collected under pressure and safely pushed into a pipeline.

Semiconductors such as silicon or gallium arsenide absorb light efficiently and are therefore used in solar panels. However, these materials also oxidize (or rust) on the surface when exposed to water, 92

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so cannot be used to directly generate fuel. A major advance that allowed the integrated system to be developed was previous work in Lewis's laboratory, which showed that adding a nanometers-thick layer of titanium dioxide (TiO2)—a material found in white paint and many toothpastes and sunscreens—onto the electrodes could prevent them from corroding while still allowing light and electrons to pass through. The new complete solar fuel generation system developed by Lewis and colleagues uses such a 62.5-nm-thick TiO2 layer to effectively prevent corrosion and improve the stability of a gallium arsenide–based photoelectrode.

Another key advance is the use of active, inexpensive catalysts for fuel production. The photoanode requires a catalyst to drive the essential water-splitting reaction. Rare and expensive metals such as platinum can serve as effective catalysts, but in its work the team discovered that it could create a much cheaper, active catalyst by adding a 2-nm-thick layer of nickel to the surface of the TiO2. This catalyst is among the most active known catalysts for splitting water molecules into oxygen, protons, and electrons and is a key to the high efficiency displayed by the device.

The photoanode was grown onto a photocathode, which also contains a highly active, inexpensive, nickel-molybdenum catalyst, to create a fully integrated single material that serves as a complete solar-driven water-splitting system.

A critical component that contributes to the efficiency and safety of the new system is the special plastic membrane that separates the gases and prevents the possibility of an explosion, while still allowing the ions to flow seamlessly to complete the electrical circuit in the cell.

All of the components are stable under the same conditions and work together to produce a high-performance, fully integrated system. The demonstration system is approximately one square centimeter in area, converts 10 percent of the energy in sunlight into stored energy in the chemical fuel, and can operate for more than 40 hours continuously.

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"This new system shatters all of the combined safety, performance, and stability records for artificial leaf technology by factors of five to 10 or more," Lewis says.

"Our work shows that it is indeed possible to produce fuels from sunlight safely and efficiently in an integrated system with inexpensive components," Lewis adds, "Of course, we still have work to do to extend the lifetime of the system and to develop methods for cost-effectively manufacturing full systems, both of which are in progress."

Because the work assembled various components that were developed by multiple teams within JCAP, coauthor Chengxiang Xiang, who is co-leader of the JCAP prototyping and scale-up project, says that the successful end result was a collaborative effort. "JCAP's research and development in device design, simulation, and materials discovery and integration all funneled into the demonstration of this new device," Xiang says.

Source: Caltech

Capture sunlight with your window Nancy Ambrosiano, Los Alamos National Laboratory R&D headlines and news, Thu, 08/27/2015 –

The luminescent solar concentrator could turn any window into a daytime power source. Image: Los Alamos National LaboratoryA luminescent solar concentrator is an emerging sunlight harvesting technology that has the potential to disrupt the way

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we think about energy: It could turn any window into a daytime power source.

“In these devices, a fraction of light transmitted through the window is absorbed by nano-sized particles (semiconductor quantum dots) dispersed in a glass window, re-emitted at the infrared wavelength invisible to the human eye, and wave-guided to a solar cell at the edge of the window,” said Victor Klimov, lead researcher on the project at the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Using this design, a nearly transparent window becomes an electrical generator, one that can power your room’s air conditioner on a hot day or a heater on a cold one.”

This is what becomes possible with new devices—quantum dot LSCs—which will be available inNature Nanotechnology. The work was performed by researchers at the Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics (CASP) of Los Alamos, led by Klimov and the research team coordinated by Sergio Brovelli and Francesco Meinardi of the Dept. of Materials Science of the Univ. of Milan-Bicocca (UNIMIB) in Italy.

In April 2014, using special composite quantum dots, the AmericanItalian collaboration demonstrated the first example of large-area luminescent solar concentrators free from reabsorption losses of the guided light by the nanoparticles. This represented a fundamental advancement with respect to the earlier technology, which was based on organic emitters that allowed for the realization of concentrators of only a few centimeters in size.

However, the quantum dots used in previous proof-of-principle devices were still unsuitable for real-world applications, as they were based on the toxic heavy metal cadmium and were capable of absorbing only a small portion of the solar light. This resulted in limited light-harvesting efficiency and strong yellow/red coloring of the concentrators, which complicated their application in residential environments.

Klimov, CASP’s director, explained how the updated approach solves the coloring problem: “Our new devices use quantum dots of a complex composition which includes copper (Cu), indium (In), selenium (Se) and sulfur (S). This composition is often abbreviated as 95

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CISeS. Importantly, these particles do not contain any toxic metals that are typically present in previously demonstrated LSCs.” “Furthermore,” Klimov noted, “the CISeS quantum dots provide a uniform coverage of the solar spectrum, thus adding only a neutral tint to a window without introducing any distortion to perceived colors.

In addition, their near-infrared emission is invisible to a human eye, but at the same time is ideally suited for most common solar cells based on silicon.”

Francesco Meinardi, professor of Physics at UNIMIB, described the emerging work, noting, “In order for this technology to leave the research laboratories and reach its full potential in sustainable architecture, it is necessary to realize non-toxic concentrators capable of harvesting the whole solar spectrum.”

“We must still preserve the key ability to transmit the guided luminescence without reabsorption losses, though, so as to complement high photovoltaic efficiency with dimensions compatible with real windows. The aesthetic factor is also of critical importance for the desirability of an emerging technology,” Meinardi said.

Hunter McDaniel, formerly a Los Alamos CASP postdoctoral fellow and presently a quantum dot entrepreneur (UbiQD founder and president), added, “with a new class of low-cost, low-hazard quantum dots composed of CISeS, we have overcome some of the biggest roadblocks to commercial deployment of this technology.”

“One of the remaining problems to tackle is reducing cost, but already this material is significantly less expensive to manufacture than alternative quantum dots used in previous LSC demonstrations,” McDaniel said.

A key element of this work is a procedure comparable to the cell casting industrial method used for fabricating high optical quality polymer windows. It involves a new UNIMIB protocol for encapsulating quantum dots into a high-optical quality transparent polymer matrix. The polymer used in this study is a cross-linked polylaurylmethacrylate, which belongs to the family of acrylate polymers. Its long side-chains prevent agglomeration of the quantum dots and provide them with the “friendly” local environment, which is similar to that of the original colloidal suspension. This allows one to 96

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preserve light emission properties of the quantum dots upon encapsulation into the polymer.

Sergio Brovelli, the lead researcher on the Italian team, concluded: “Quantum dot solar window technology, of which we had demonstrated the feasibility just one year ago, now becomes a reality that can be transferred to the industry in the short to medium term, allowing us to convert not only rooftops, as we do now, but the whole body of urban buildings, including windows, into solar energy generators.”

“This is especially important in densely populated urban area where the rooftop surfaces are too small for collecting all the energy required for the building operations,” he said. He proposes that the team’s estimations indicate that by replacing the passive glazing of a skyscraper such as the One World Trade Center in NYC (72,000 square meters divided into 12,000 windows) with our technology, it would be possible to generate the equivalent of the energy need of over 350 apartments.

“Add to these remarkable figures, the energy that would be saved by the reduced need for air conditioning thanks to the filtering effect by the LSC, which lowers the heating of indoor spaces by sunlight, and you have a potentially game-changing technology towards “net-zero” energy cities,” Brovelli said.

Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Researchers efficiently charge a lithium-ion battery with solar cell Kevin Mayhood, Case Western Reserve Univ., R&D headlines and news , Fri, 08/28/2015

Consumers aren't embracing electric cars and trucks, partly due to the dearth of charging stations required to keep them moving. Even the conservation-minded are hesitant to go electric in some states because, studies show, if fossil fuels generate the electricity, the car is no greener than one powered with an efficient gasoline.

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Charging cars by solar cell would appear to be the answer. But most cells fail to meet the power requirements needed to directly charge lithium-ion batteries used in today's all-electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve Univ., however, have wired four perovskite solar cells in series to enhance the voltage and directly photo-charged lithium batteries with 7.8% efficiency—the most efficient reported to date, the researchers believe.

The research, published in Nature Communications, holds promise for cleaner transportation, home power sources and more.

"We found the right match between the solar cell and battery," said Liming Dai, the Kent Hale Smith Professor of macromolecular science and engineering and leader of the research. "Others have used polymer solar cells to charge lithium batteries, but not with this efficiency."

In fact, the researchers say their overall photoelectric conversion and storage outperformed all other reported couplings of a photo-charging component with lithium-ion batteries, flow batteries or supercapacitors.

Perovskite solar cells have active materials with a crystalline structure identical to the mineral perovskite and are considered a promising new design for capturing solar energy. Compared to silicon-based cells, they convert a broader spectrum of sunlight into electricity.

In short order, they have matched the energy conversion of silicon cells, and researchers around the world are pursuing further advances.

Dai's lab made multilayer solar cells, which increases their energy density, performance and stability. Testing showed that, as desired, the three layers convert into a single perovskite film.

By wiring four lab-sized cells, about 0.1 cm square each, in series, the researchers further increased the open circuit voltage. The solarto-electric power conversion efficiency was 12.65%.

To charge button-sized lithium-ion batteries, they used a lithium-ionphosphate cathode and a lithium-titanium-oxide anode. The photoelectric conversion and storage efficiency was 7.8%. Through 10 photo-charge/galvanostatic (steady current) discharge cycles 98

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lasting nearly 18 hrs, the technology maintained almost identical discharge/charge curves over all cycles, showing high cycling stability and compatibility of the components.

"We envision, in the not too distant future, this is a system that you could have at home to refuel your car and, eventually, because perovskite solar cells can be made as a flexible film, they would be on the car itself," said Jiantie Xu, who, with Yonghua Chen, is an equally contributing first author of the study. Both are macromolecular science and engineering research associates in Case School of Engineering.

The researchers are developing small-scale prototypes and working to further improve the perovskite cell's stability and optimize the system.

Source: Case Western Reserve Univ.

Engineers identify how to keep surfaces dry underwater Megan Fellman, Northwestern Univ. R&D headlines and news, Tue, 08/18/2015 - 5:30pm Imagine staying dry underwater for months. Now Northwestern Univ. engineers have examined a wide variety of surfaces that can do just that—and, better yet, they know why.

The research team is the first to identify the ideal "roughness" needed in the texture of a surface to keep it dry for a long period of time when submerged in water. The valleys in the surface roughness typically need to be less than one micron in width, the researchers found.

That's really small—less than one millionth of a meter—but these nanoscopic valleys have macroscopic impact.

Understanding how the surfaces deflect water so well means the valuable feature could be reproduced in other materials on a mass scale, potentially saving billions of dollars in a variety of industries, from antifouling surfaces for shipping to pipe coatings resulting in lower drag. That's science and engineering, not serendipity, at work for the benefit of the economy.

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"The trick is to use rough surfaces of the right chemistry and size to promote vapor formation, which we can use to our advantage," said Neelesh A. Patankar, a theoretical mechanical engineer who led the research.

"When the valleys are less than one micron wide, pockets of water vapor or gas accumulate in them by underwater evaporation or effervescence, just like a drop of water evaporates without having to boil it. These gas pockets deflect water, keeping the surface dry," he said.

In a study published by Scientific Reports, Patankar and his coauthors explain and demonstrate the nanoscale mechanics behind the phenomenon of staying dry underwater.

In their experiments, the researchers used a variety of materials with and without the key surface roughness and submerged them in water.

Samples with the nanoscale roughness remained dry for up to four months, the duration of the experiment. Other samples were placed in harsh environments, where dissolved gas was removed from the ambient liquid, and they also remained dry.

"It was amazing and what we were hoping for," said Patankar, a professor of mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. "My lab likes to defy normal experience. In this work, we looked for properties that manipulate the water phase changes we know."

The researchers also report that nature uses the same strategy of surface roughness in certain aquatic insects, such as water bugs and water striders. Small hairs on the surfaces of their body have the lessthan-one-micron spacing, allowing gas to be retained between the hairs.

"These gas-retaining insects have surface properties consistent with our predictions, allowing them to stay dry for a long time," said Paul R. Jones, the study's first author. He is a PhD student in Patankar's research group.

The researchers focused on the nanoscopic structure of surfaces, which, at the nanoscale, are somewhat akin to the texture of a carpet, with tiny spike-like elevations separated by valley-shaped pores in between.

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When submerged, water tends to cling to the top of the spikes, while air and water vapor accrue in the pores between them. The combination of trapped air and water vapor within these cavities forms a gaseous layer that deters moisture from seeping into the surface below.

"When we looked at the rough surfaces under the microscope, we could see clearly the vacant gaps—where the protective water vapor is," Patankar said.

Historically, scientists had not understood how to keep water vapor from succumbing to condensation within the pore, which can cause water to wet the surface. But the Northwestern team found the molecular key: They demonstrated that when the valleys are less than one micron in width, they can sustain the trapped air as well as vapor in their gasified states, strengthening the seal that thwarts wetness.

Source: Northwestern Univ.

Milestone achieved in hybrid artificial photosynthesis Berkeley Lab, R&D headlines and news, Tue, 08/25/2015 - 10:29am

Artificial photosynthesis used to produce renewable molecular hydrogen for synthesizing carbon dioxide into methane. Courtesy of Berkeley LabA team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) developing a bioinorganic hybrid approach to artificial photosynthesis have achieved another milestone. Having generated quite a buzz with their hybrid system of 101

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semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that used electrons to synthesize carbon dioxide into acetate, the team has now developed a hybrid system that produces renewable molecular hydrogen and uses it to synthesize carbon dioxide into methane, the primary constituent of natural gas.

“This study represents another key breakthrough in solar-to-chemical energy conversion efficiency and artificial photosynthesis,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and one of the leaders of this study. “By generating renewable hydrogen and feeding it to microbes for the production of methane, we can now expect an electrical-to-chemical efficiency of better than 50 percent and a solar-to-chemical energy conversion efficiency of 10-percent if our system is coupled with state-of-art solar panel and electrolyzer.”

Yang, who also holds appointments with UC Berkeley and the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (Kavli-ENSI) at Berkeley, is one of three corresponding authors of a paper describing this research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper is titled “A hybrid bioinorganic approach to solar-to-chemical conversion.” The other corresponding authors are Michelle Chang and Christopher Chang. Both also hold joint appointments with Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. In addition, Chris Chang is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. (See below for a full list of the paper’s authors.)

Photosynthesis is the process by which nature harvests the energy in sunlight and uses it to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. Carbohyrates are biomolecules that store the chemical energy used by living cells. In the original hybrid artificial photosynthesis system developed by the Berkeley Lab team, an array of silicon and titanium oxide nanowires collected solar energy and delivered electrons to microbes which used them to reduce carbon dioxide into a variety of value-added chemical products. In the new system, solar energy is used to split the water molecule into molecular oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is then transported to

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microbes that use it to reduce carbon dioxide into one specific chemical product, methane.

“In our latest work, we’ve demonstrated two key advances,” says Chris Chang. “First, our use of renewable hydrogen for carbon dioxide fixation opens up the possibility of using hydrogen that comes from any sustainable energy source, including wind, hydrothermal and nuclear. Second, having demonstrated one promising organism for using renewable hydrogen, we can now, through synthetic biology, expand to other organisms and other value-added chemical products.”

The concept in the two studies is essentially the same—a membrane of semiconductor nanowires that can harness solar energy is populated with bacterium that can feed off this energy and use it to produce a targeted carbon-based chemical. In the new study, the membrane consisted of indium phosphide photocathodes and titanium dioxide photoanodes. Whereas in the first study, the team worked with Sporomusa ovata, an anaerobic bacterium that readily accepts electrons from the surrounding environment to reduce carbon dioxide, in the new study the team populated the membrane with Methanosarcina barkeri, an anaerobic archaeon that reduces carbon dioxide using hydrogen rather than electrons.

“Using hydrogen as the energy carrier rather than electrons makes for a much more efficient process as molecular hydrogen, through its chemical bonds, has a much higher density for storing and transporting energy,” says Michelle Chang.

In the newest membrane reported by the Berkeley team, solar energy is absorbed and used to generate hydrogen from water via the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). The HER is catalyzed by earthabundant nickel sulfide nanoparticles that operate effectively under biologically compatible conditions. Hydrogen produced in the HER is directly utilized by the Methanosarcina barkeriarchaeons in the membrane to produce methane.

“We selected methane as an initial target owing to the ease of product separation, the potential for integration into existing 103

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infrastructures for the delivery and use of natural gas, and the fact that direct conversion of carbon dioxide to methane with synthetic catalysts has proven to be a formidable challenge,” says Chris Chang. “Since we still get the majority of our methane from natural gas, a fossil fuel, often from fracking, the ability to generate methane from a renewable hydrogen source is another important advance.”

Adds Yang, “While we were inspired by the process of natural photosynthesis and continue to learn from it, by adding nanotechnology to help improve the efficiency of natural systems we are showing that sometimes we can do even better than nature.”

In addition to the corresponding authors, other co-authors of the PNAS paper describing this research were Eva Nichols, Joseph Gallagher, Chong Liu, Yude Su, Joaquin Resasco, Yi Yu and Yujie Sung.

This research was primarily funded by the DOE Office of Science.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit the Office of Science website at science.energy.gov/.

Analysis: Drones gaining traction in oil, gas rig inspection Oil and natural gas companies are increasingly turning to drones to save time and improve safety in their rig inspections. "What we can 104

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capture in five days using a drone could take eight weeks with human inspectors," said Chris Blackford, co-founder and chief operating officer at drone provider Sky-Futures. Drones also allow a company to save over $4 million by enabling inspection without shutting down operations, according to Sky-Futures. Bloomberg (8/20) Oil rig inspection is a dangerous business. Traditionally roughnecks dangled from a wire, in gale-force winds if needed, to manually log wear and tear on the girders. Assessments include giant chimneys — called flare stacks — that belch fire during million-dollar-aday shutdowns.

Increasingly the industry has found that swapping abseiling humans for small drones equipped with high-definition and thermal cameras can save time, cut costs and improve safety.

"These are large metal structures in a big pond of seawater. They will rust a lot, particularly in the North Sea where rigs designed to last 20 years are lasting more than 40. They are continually getting cracks and physical damage from the waves and need to be refurbished and fixed," says Chris Blackford, Sky Futures' chief operations officer.

Sky Futures — headquartered in London — is a drone inspection company specializing in the oil and gas industry and counts BP, Shell, Apache, BG Group and Statoil among its clients. It's one of a handful of companies — including Cyberhawk, PrecisionHawk and SenseFly — finding commercial applications for drones.

“Decided to focus on oil and gas because the barriers to entry are very high, but there are real problems to be solved and the economics were better, despite the very low oil price," Blackford says.

Business, Blackford says, is booming. Although the first drone inspections were carried out five years ago, demand for Sky Futures' and Cyberhawk's services has surged, more than doubling in the last year alone.

At the start of 2015 the Federal Aviation Administration finally relaxed its stance on drones flying in U.S. airspace, giving companies like Sky 105

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Futures access to the world's largest offshore market. "We will continue doubling, if not tripling, revenues over the next three to five years," says Blackford.

Drone Data Inspections involve sending one drone operator and one engineer out to a rig to fly a small aerial vehicle around the platform, building a 3D model of the structure and mapping any anomalies.

"What we can capture in five days using a drone could take eight weeks with human inspectors," Blackford says. "We can even inspect the flare stacks while in production, which saves money." Avoiding a shutdown can save more than $4 million, the company says.

A mock-up of an inspection report presented through Sky Futures' online portal Once the data is captured, it's analyzed using proprietary algorithms and presented through an online portal, instead of a traditional paper report. Each flaw is flagged in red, amber or green, based on urgency. Thanks to lasers, Sky Futures' drones can track cracks and corrosion and map how they evolve over time.

They can even sniff for gas leaks.

Cyberhawk, founded in 2008 in Livingston, Scotland, offers a similar service to oil and gas companies as well as inspecting renewable energy plants with wind turbines, communications towers, pipelines and railway lines and bridges.

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Cyberhawk's commercial director, Phil Buchan, says his customers don't care about the drones, only the data: "They care about the information you can give them and the decisions you can help them make."

Blackford agrees: "We view ourselves as a data business and not a drone business."

North Carolina-based PrecisionHawk has served the oil and gas industry by mapping the ice roads across remote areas of Alaska. In the past, coming within five miles of a polar bear den would have meant the replanning of routes at a cost of millions of dollars to avoid the animals. PrecisionHawk's drones can identify the dens in advance.

Automation The next milestone for inspection drones is automating their flight.

"We still have to send out an oil and gas inspection engineer and a drone pilot. Our vision is total automation," says Blackford.

Trouble is, drone technology isn't yet good enough.

Jeremy Howitt, who oversees drone research at Qinetiq, says, "Once aircraft know where other vehicles and obstacles are and they have the ability to safely avoid collisions and areas of known traffic density, it will open up many new applications."

Beyond oil and gas, there are plenty of other applications for these airborne inspectors.

"Oil and gas is a big vertical, but the same technology applies to lots of industries — wind farms, solar, other refineries, pipelines and other fixed infrastructure," says Simon Menashy, investment director at venture capital firm MMC Ventures, which invested $4 million in Sky Futures in May. That's before even looking at construction and agriculture. "There is lots of opportunity," he adds.

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Four Indians in MIT’s 'Innovators Under 35' list Indulekha Aravind, ET Bureau Aug 19, 2015 BENGALURU: A cooling material that saves energy by sending heat into outer space and can be used for air-conditioning with very little electricity.

An affordable obstacle detection system for the blind, which uses ultrasonic ranging. Technologies that could make it easy for semiliterate people to use online services by talking into phones or making gestures which would be picked up by cameras.

A low-cost infant warmer that does not need continuous power.

These are the path-breaking innovations that have ensured four Indians a place in this year's edition of MIT Technology Review's prestigious list of '35 Innovators Under 35', announced early on Tuesday.

Previous winners include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the selection is a recognition the publication accords to "exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world," according to an MIT release.

Rahul Alex Panicker, co-founder of Embrace Innovations which makes infant warmers that do not need continuous power, has been acknowledged as a humanitarian for his work in medicine and biotechnology" while Xerox India researcher Saurabh Srivastava's "voice and gestural interfaces could make digital technologies available to the world's poorest people", according to MIT Tech Review. "The work is very satisfying because it is aimed at marginalised users," Srivastava, 30, said, adding that he was very happy with the recognition.

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His work, which focuses on helping people deprived of technology get real-time information online, is primarily in voice- and gesture-based interfaces for lowliterate users.

Panicker, 34, said the recognition was a huge honour. "I hope it inspires more young innovators to pursue their passion, grab that solder-iron and go change the world!" he said. Incidentally, both Panicker and Srivastava are currently based in Bengaluru.

Among the Indian winners is Rohan Paul, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, whose 'SmartCane' for the blind vibrates when it detects obstacles through ultrasonic sensors. Paul has termed his $50 device for the blind a "people's product" and "a humble tribute to the Mahatma".

Aaswath Raman, the fourth Indian in MIT's rankings has crafted a unique material with "optimum levels of thermal radiation and solar reflection" which, when used to coat a roof that's not insulated, would keep the insides cool. The post-doctoral researcher at Stanford has received $3 million funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy to develop his technology.

"Over the years, we've had success in choosing young innovators whose work has been profoundly influential on the direction of human affairs," MIT Technology Review editor-inchief and publisher Jason Pontin was quoted as saying. "Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google, Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook and Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple.

We're proud of our selections and the variety of achievements they celebrate..."

Last year's edition of MIT Tech Review's 35 winners included three Indians: Tanuja Ganu, for her work in coming up with a simple device to monitor India's power grid cheaply and easily, Manu Prakash, for his innovative, "frugal" scientific instruments such as a $5 microfluidic chemistry lab, and Shyam Gollakota, for his prototypes of battery-free wireless devices.

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Soaking up carbon dioxide and turning it into valuable products Lynn Yarris, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, R&D headlines and news, Thu, 08/27/2015 Structural model showing a covalent organic framework (COF) embedded with a cobalt porphyrin. Image: Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryA molecular system that holds great promise for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide has been modified so that it now also holds great promise as a catalyst for converting captured carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products.

Researchers with the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have incorporated molecules of carbon dioxide reduction catalysts into the sponge-like crystals of covalent organic frameworks (COFs). This creates a molecular system that not only absorbs carbon dioxide, but also selectively reduces it to carbon monoxide, which serves as a primary building block for a wide range of chemical products including fuels, pharmaceuticals and plastics.

“There have been many attempts to develop homogeneous or heterogeneous catalysts for carbon dioxide, but the beauty of using COFs is that we can mix-and-match the best of both worlds, meaning we have molecular control by choice of catalysts plus the robust crystalline nature of the COF,” says Christopher Chang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Div., and a co-leader of this study. “To date, such porous materials have mainly been used for 110

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carbon capture and separation, but in showing they can also be used for carbon dioxide catalysis, our results open up a huge range of potential applications in catalysis and energy.”

Chang and Omar Yaghi, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Div. who invented COFs, are the corresponding authors of a paper in Science that describes this research in detail. Lead authors are Song Lin, Christian Diercks and Yue-Biao Zhang. Other coauthors are Nikolay Kornienko, Eva Nichols, Yingbo Zhao, Aubrey Paris, Dohyung Kim and Peidong Ya ng.

Chang and Yaghi both hold appointments with the Univ. of California (UC) Berkeley. Chang is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. Yaghi is co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (Kavli-ENSI) at UC Berkeley.

The notoriety of carbon dioxide for its impact on the atmosphere and global climate change has overshadowed its value as an abundant, renewable, nontoxic and nonflammable source of carbon for the manufacturing of widely used chemical products. With the reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions in mind, Yaghi and his research group at the University of Michigan in 2005 designed and developed the first COFs as a means of separating carbon dioxide from flue gases. A COF is a porous three-dimensional crystal consisting of a tightly folded, compact framework that features an extraordinarily large internal surface area – a COF the size of a sugar cube were it to be opened and unfolded would blanket a football field.

The sponge-like quality of a COF’s vast internal surface area enables the system to absorb and store enormous quantities of targeted molecules, such as carbon dioxide.

Now, through another technique developed by Yaghi, called “reticular chemistry,” which enables molecular systems to be “stitched” into netlike structures that are held together by strong chemical bonds, the Berkeley Lab researchers were able to embed the molecular backbone of COFs with a porphyrin catalyst, a ring-shaped organic 111

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molecule with a cobalt atom at its core. Porphyrins are electrical conductors that are especially proficient at transporting electrons to carbon dioxide.

“A key feature of COFs is the ability to modify chemically active sites at will with molecular-level control by tuning the building blocks constituting a COF’s framework,” Yaghi says. “This affords a significant advantage over other solid-state catalysts where tuning the catalytic properties with that level of rational design remains a major challenge. Because the porphyrin COFs are stable in water, they can operate in aqueous electrolyte with high selectivity over competing water reduction reactions, an essential requirement for working with flue gas emissions.”

In performance tests, the porphyrin COFs displayed exceptionally high catalytic activity—a turnover number up to 290,000, meaning one porphyrin COF can reduce 290,000 molecules of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide every second. This represents a 60-fold increase over the catalytic activity of molecular cobalt porphyrin catalyst and places porphyrin COFs among the fastest and most efficient catalysts of all known carbon dioxide reduction agents. Furthermore, the research team believes there’s plenty of room for further improving porphyrin COF performances.

“We’re now seeking to increase the number of electroactive cobalt centers and achieve lower over-potentials while maintaining high activity and selectivity for carbon dioxide reduction over proton reduction,” Chang says. “In addition we are working towards expanding the types of value-added carbon products that can be made using COFs and related frameworks.”

Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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ALTERNATIVE & RENEWABLE ENERGY

India’s Cochin is the World’s First Solar-Powered Airport

Joe Ravi/iStock Following the inauguration of a 45-acre, 12 MWp solar power plant, India's Cochin International Airport is the world's first fully solarpowered airport.

Dignitaries were on hand as airport authorities flipped the switch on more than 46,150 newly installed solar panels, which will produce an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 units of electricity daily. Each year, the airport could produce up to 18 million units of electricity, enough to power 10,000 homes.

Cochin first dabbled in solar power in March 2013, when authorities installed a 100 kWp solar power plant on the roof of the airport's terminal building; another 1 MWp installation atop a maintenance hangar followed shortly thereafter. Together, the two plants are estimated to have already cut carbon dioxide emissions by 550MT. With the addition of the newest plant, authorities say that the facility will be completely "power neutral."

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Binu Jayakrishnan via Wikimedia Commons "Over the next 25 years, this green power project will avoid carbon dioxide emissions from coal fired power plants by more than 3 lakh metric tons, which is equivalent to planting 3 million trees," authorities said in a statement.

Any surplus power produced will be pushed back into the local grid, Engadget reports.

Cochin is the seventh busiest airport in India by passenger load, ferrying almost 7 million people in the past year.

Dry Ice Power An engine powered by levitating dry ice. Image: Jonathan Sanderson, Think Physics, Northumbria University Newcastle.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at the highest they’ve been in some millions of years.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could take all the excess CO2 and somehow turn it into energy? Not likely to happen here on Earth. But researchers at Northumbria University have created a carbon dioxide

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engine that could very well take care of all our power needs—on Mars.

The trick to making a CO2 engine is a phenomenon called theLeidenfrost effect. You can see it in action here on earth with water (see video). Flick a few drops onto a hot skillet and they’ll bounce and skitter about, rather than spread and flow as they would at lower temperatures. The frantic behavior is due to the speed at which the drops vaporize where they make contact with the pan. That vapor keeps the droplet floating above the surface, capable of darting around free of friction.

The Northumbrian researchers had been toying with dry ice and the Leidenfrost effect for some time. Dry ice vaporizes at a much lower temperature than water, as you know if you’ve ever played with the packaging that your Omaha Steaks came in. The researchers found that they could control the direction that the ice moved across a surface by adding grooves to that surface. “At some point we realized we could wrap the linear substrate into a circle,” says Rodrigo Ledesma-Aguilar, a lecturer in the Department of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the university. “That’s when the penny dropped.”

On the ribbed circular surface, disks of dry ice levitate, and run seemingly endless, frictionless laps. “When we first saw this disk spinning, the first thing that surprised us was how fast they would spin,” says Ledesma-Aguilar. “We weren’t expecting it.” Here was the promise of power. Stick a few magnets in the ice and you’ve got a power generator. And the fact that there was no friction was spectacular. “We are very excited to look at something with no bearing at all.”

However many Omaha Steaks you might order in a year, there’s no denying that dry ice is not to be found in abundance on this planet.

But astronomers now think that Mars has heaps of the stuff, some in the form of giant boulders. Of course, the boulders would not be slapped onto a turntable and instantly start running in circles. For the Leidenfrost phenomenon to kick in, the disk of ice can’t be so large that the attractive power of gravity overcomes the levitating power of the vapor. So the trick is to keep things micro. “If you go to 115

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microgravity, either by going to small scale or to place where there’s less gravity, the rotational forces go higher and higher,” says Ledesma-Aguilar.

In a sense, such an engine harvests energy from periodic changes in weather (seasons, you might call them). “If you think about it, it’s not dissimilar to hydroelectric plants on Earth,” says Ledesma-Aguilar.

“They work on the water cycle: after evaporating, water rains on mountains, maybe it flows down, then creates steam with enough kinetic energy to drive a power plant. The energy you’re harvesting is the energy of a natural cycle. The idea of energy harvesting on Mars is not that far fetched.”

Energy generated using dry ice block, magnets and coils.

Image: Think Physics, Northumbria University Newcastle Of course, we wouldn’t have to go there personally to get the Leidenfrost effect pumping out juice. A well-trained Mars rover could set things up and power itself without too much difficulty.

Then, with luck, there will be something for us to plug our cell phone chargers into waiting for us once we decide to colonize the place.

“We would be thrilled, of course, if at some point these ideas were taken up by NASA,” says Ledesma-Aguilar. “If these natural resources are on Mars, it is only natural that people will put it to good use.”

Michael Abrams is an independent writer.

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Texas researchers find promising solution for storing solar energy Solar storage When the Sun Goes down The problem of storing solar energy for nighttime use may by on the way to a viable and cost-effective solution, thanks to researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington. Their system combines a solar cell with a redox flow battery, which uses a liquid electrolyte that stores energy in a tank that can be any size. The result is potentially enormous capacity. ASME.org (8/2015)

That star at the center of our solar system, in addition to being the source of all life on the planet, may also be our best hope for clean, safe, and abundant energy. If we could just get the technology right it could power all our needs for the next five billion years or so.

The only problem is that pesky shadow it casts on half the planet, called night; that and the clouds that dull its shine.

In short, the sun’s intermittency is holding us back. Systems using photovoltaic cells with lithium ion batteries or photosynthesis with hydrogen are inefficient and imperfect, unable to provide the uninterrupted power that modern life demands.

An all-vanadium photo-electrochemical solar cell, that can store energy even when it's dark. Image: UT Arlington Now researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington may have solved that problem, at least at a small scale.

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liquid electrolyte, and a solar cell. “Under light, the electrons will be stored inside the material, like in a rechargeable battery,” says Fuqiang Liu, a professor in the department of materials science and engineering at the university. “Then, when you switch to dark, those electrons will be released spontaneously.” This instant and efficient “electron storage reversibility” is the key to a seamless solar powered future.

A lithium ion battery with photovoltaic cells is a closed system with a capacity determined by the battery’s volume. But Liu’s new system is open. That is, the chemical agent, vanadium redox, is stored in an external tank, which can be as large you like. Its greater charge and discharge efficiency (or “round trip efficiency,” as Liu’s paper calls it) is owed to the vanadium redox electrolyte, which reacts quickly to electrons on the surface of the cell’s semiconductor. The faradaic efficiency of the system is 95 percent.

Liu’s system is likely to beat photovoltaic cells in the budget sphere as well. Vanadium is cheap compared to the noble metals needed for today’s solar cells.

Dong Liu (left), Zi Wei (center) and Prof.

Fuqiang Liu. Image: UT Arlington The only downside of the cell is that it’s not very portable. “Because this is a complicated system—it involves flow and a liquid electrolyte, a storage tank, pump, and control systems—it’s primarily suitable for stationary applications,” says Liu. So you won’t be seeing any “Reversible Electron Storage in an All-Vanadium Photoelectrochemical Storage Cell” powered automobiles hurtling down the highway, saving the world with their zero emissions, anytime soon.

But even stationary applications are a ways off. Liu’s proof of concept cell is about one inch by one inch in size. The storage tank holds less than a hundred milliliters. “If you use a large tank the storage can be huge, but to charge the entire electrolyte you need 1,000 hours or so,” he says. But Liu sees no hurdles to scaling up.

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Redox batteries have already been shown to be effective for massive storage systems—a megawatt system currently helps power Washington State University.

“We still need extensive research to really understand the system and make sure that it will work when we eventually scale up,” says Liu. Assuming it does, it won’t be just the adventurous, green minded folk among us that chose to power a house, a building, or even a town with solar. It’ll just make good, economic sense.

Michael Abrams is an independent writer.

India is quietly contributing in construction of world's largest nuclear fusion reactor BS, August 22, 2015 Near the banks of the Sabarmati, in the green city of Gandhinagar, a team of 122 scientists and engineers from across India is working silently on building some crucial nuclear components. These are meant to power the world’s largest nuclear reactor, coming up in the Cadarache province of southern France.

At a time when an impasse over the Indo-US nuclear deal has been broken (in January) and both countries are looking forward to steering their ‘123 agreement’, and when the world is talking about nuclear non-proliferation, India is working diligently to build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) by 2019.

Amid hushed voices on the threat that nuclear power might pose and past horrors, ITER’s motivated team of scientists and trainees works in tandem with the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR).

A mega international nuclear fusion research & engineering project, ITER is currently building the world’s largest experimental tokamak 119

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nuclear fusion reactor. A tokamak is a device that uses a magnetic field to confine plasma (fourth state of matter) in the shape of a torus.

The ITER project aims to make the long-awaited transition from experimental studies of plasma physics to full-scale electricityproducing fusion power plants. It is seen as a method for electricity production from fusion energy — one for the future. The most vital aim is to produce at least 10 times more thermal energy than that required to operate it. This energy could be converted into electricity in future power-producing reactors. Scientists have dreamt of accomplishing this feat for half a century, but it wasn’t until 2006 that some progress was made with the formation of ITER. ITER’s mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power, and to prove it can work without any negative impact.

Conceptualised in 1985, after an initiative by President Mikhail Gorbachov of the erstwhile Soviet Union and President Ronald Reagan of the US, the ITER project is funded and run by seven member entities — the European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the US. It will be built mostly through in-kind contributions by the partners, where they manufacture the ITER components assigned to them through their representative Domestic Agencies (DAs). These components are then delivered to the ITER site for final assembling.

The ITER fusion reactor has been designed to produce 500 Mw of output power, with an input of just 50 Mw to operate. Production of more energy from the fusion process than that required to initiate the machine — ITER’s main aim — is unprecedented for fusion reactors.

The construction phase of the facility is expected to be completed in 2019; it will start commissioning the reactor the same year and initiate plasma experiments in 2020. Full deuterium-tritium fusion experiments will start in 2027. If ITER becomes operational, it will become the largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in use, surpassing the Joint European Torus.

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India is providing a 10th of the components for the massive nuclear complex being set up at Cadarache. New Delhi is contributing what on completion in 2021 will be the world’s largest refrigerator. The cryostat acts like a thermos flask but operates at some of the lowest temperatures seen in the universe — at minus 269 degrees celsius.

This is used for keeping the special super conducting magnets at the low temperature at which they need to operate. The entire fusion system will collapse if it can’t be kept cold.

India is also expected to contribute about Rs 9,000 core over the next decade to the project, paying a little under 10 per cent of the total cost.

Ratan K Sinha, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Mumbai, had recently remarked: “Participation of India in the ITER project, with its immense scientific talent and industrial competence, has provided an opportunity to India to master cutting-edge technologies.”

Note: As a research trainee with ITER-India, this writer became part of the ITER team and witnessed first-hand the technical struggles and mitigating efforts to address glitches. The small team is working with great fervour to produce all power sub-systems within the stipulated deadline. India is expecting positive results and successive project successes in the coming decade.

The Future Will Run on Algae How algae will take over the world Algal biofuels could be the next big thing, with researchers hoping to see algae fuel plunge to $3 a gallon, making it cost-competitive with gasoline. "In the next couple of decades, we could get algae-based fuels to that level," said Alison Goss Eng, a program manager at the Energy Department's Bioenergy Technologies Office.Gizmodo (7/16) 21,596 Bryan Lufkin 121

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Filed to: ENERGY7/16/15 In the twentieth century, oil was black gold. But as we march deeper into the twenty-first century, we could have a lucrative new fuel on our hands. One that’s blue-green and sometimes a little smelly. It’s found in wastewater, but it’s capable of powering jets. It’s algae.

How It Works To be specific, it’s actually microalgae. Though it looks like green scum or strands of hair floating on the water, microalgae is actually made up of microscopic, single-celled organisms capable of photosynthesis, like plants. They slurp in sunlight, and convert it to energy. They’re also able to suck up carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and cars, turning it into oxygen. So they run on solar power and they scrub the air, both of which are very appealing qualities for a post-oil world.

But the real lure of microalgae is its ability to produce fuel. Some of these minuscule, aquatic microorganisms produce oils to store energy. Scientists can convert that oil into fuel for cars, trucks, trains, and planes. This is better for the environment than fossil fuels, because it’s carbon neutral: The plants draw down as much carbon as they put out. Plus, algae is a renewable resource, meaning we can make more and more of it forever.

The whole system is so efficient that the US Department of Energy says algae fuels could be running any machine that’s dependent on diesel today.

And this isn’t some scifi, pie-in-the-sky fuel source that we hope to have someday. It’s already here. Back in 2011, United Airlines made history with the first algae-powered passenger flight from Chicago to Houston.

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Japan is also pursuing algae as a biofuel source. A company called Euglena Co. — named by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has his “favorite startup” — has partnered with Isuzu Motors to produce a fleet of ecofriendly buses that run on microalgae. They also plan to fuel a commercial flight of their own using only algae biofuel by the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Here in the US, scientists have been researching algal biofuels since the late 1970s, but it’s only been in the last six years or so that funding from places like the Department of Energy has kicked back up again. Why the sudden interest? Because there’s no arguing with the benefits.

Why It’s Great Because of its energy-producing properties, and because of the fact that algae grow quickly (doubling their number in a matter of hours), researchers want to harness it for a greater good.

“We are aiming to commercialize in the near future,” says Naoto Mukunoki, a spokesperson for Euglena. “The fuel derived from euglena is very light, and doesn’t harden in the sky’s low temperature.

This is the same characteristic of kerosene, or existing jet fuel.”

Which could make carbon-spraying planes way less harmful for the environment. Another plus: You can also grow algae in places where you couldn’t grow anything else, like brackish waters or wastewater.

Algae growing ponds at UC San Diego We could even stick algae ponds next to power plants that release carbon dioxide into the air, using their C02 emissions to power those algae ponds. Did I mention it’s homegrown? There’s no import cost, so we can save money and improve the environment right here at home.

It’s even got an edge over other biofuels. Take corn-based ethanols, for example. While those veggie-derived ethanols can already power vehicles, the Department of Energy says that microalgae could produce up to 60 times more oil per acre than plants grown on land.

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productivity as anywhere from 10 to 100 times higher than biofuels made from feedstocks.

But hold on there, friends. Before you start scraping the sides of your filthy goldfish tank hoping to solve the world’s energy crisis, there are some things you need to know.

Why It’s a Pain in the Ass So, what’s the hold up? Why isn’t verdant pond scum powering all of our cars yet? The science is mature. But you can probably guess the roadblock: it’s the other kind of green. The evil one. That dolla dolla bill.

Right now, mass-producing microalgae whose oils we can harness as biofuels is prohibitively expensive. That’s why scientists are trying to figure out ways to get the most bang for your buck. They’re looking for the types of algae that can withstand environmental stresses andproduce a lot of fuel-replacing oil.

But therein lies another problem. Not just any algae will power a Dreamliner. Scientists look for those super algaes in a process called “strain identification.” Once we figure out how to produce more of those specific algae strain quickly and on a large scale, that’ll be a huge leap toward commercialization.

Alison Goss Eng is a program manager at the Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office. She says that their goal is to get algae fuel costs to around $3 a gallon. “[It’s] something that we think would be competitive with gasoline,” she says. “In the next couple of decades, we could get algae-based fuels to that level. A lot of that has to do with getting the algae to be really productive. We need to get yields up really high.”

To do this, the researchers take the selected strain and genetically modify it. They change its environment and run it through stress tests, forcing it to produce as much oil as possible. This is called “strain improvement,” and it helps the team figure out which conditions render the most plentiful and powerful masses of algae. What’s the water temperature? What’s the right amount of light?

These tests give scientists a better idea of how to maximize costs and grow the strongest algae the fastest. They’re doing this in both open 124

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ponds and what are called “photobiotic reactors”: closed tubes or plastic bags with algae growing inside.

“Converting [the oils to fuel] is really expensive,” Eng says. So her team is partnering with algae-focused businesses and research institutions to research the best ways to get the most out of those algae strain. Crack the algae’s code, and we could crack our energy problems.

What the Future Holds Algae isn’t just a potential wonder fuel, however. It also has uses in skin care products, omega 3-rich baby formula, livestock feed, chemical processing … and endless other possibilities.

And we really mean “endless.” Even surfboards made out of algae are a thing, like the one announced in April by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. You see, fossil fuels find their way into surfboards (and a lot of other stuff) via polyurethane foam.

But using algal oils actually improves the surf board’s performance by making it more flexible — and, more importantly, it eliminated the need to use unsustainable fossil fuels. Algae even lets us build flexible robots that move in a more human-like way.

But before we can start pumping everyday objects full of sustainable, magical algae oils, we need to drive the price of production down.

That’s researchers’ biggest obstacle right now.

Eng says the algae industry is gunning for “aggressive productivity” in the next 10 to 20 years. In the nearer term, the Department of Energy is aiming to get algae-per-acre production up to 5,000 gallons by 2022. Not an easy task, and not a cheap one.

However, once an emerging technology gets the greenlight from presidents, prime ministers, major universities, and billion-dollar airline conglomerates—which algae already has—progress can only go forward.

It’s not easy being green, but damn, will it pay off in the end.

Illustration by Jim Cooke

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TOP

HSE, CLIMATE CHANGE & SUSTAINABILITY

Indian Oil's Fire-Hit Unit at Koyali Plant Shut for Maintenance Thomson Reuters | Last Updated: August 24, 2015 12:55 (IST) Indian Oil Corp said all units at its 274,000 barrels per day (bpd) Koyali refinery in western Gujarat are running normally except the 44,000 bpd crude distillation unit (CDU), where a minor fire occurred during a planned maintenance shutdown.

"There has been no fatality; however there are five cases of injuries to employees of Gujarat Refinery," the company said in a statement issued on Sunday.

IOC, the country's biggest refiner, had shut the 44,000 bpd crude unit 2-3 days ago for routine maintenance, a company source said, adding the shutdown will last for about 25 days.

Koyali refinery has five CDUs. © Thomson Reuters 2015

SIX U.S. UNIVERSITIES TO STUDY ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF MANUFACTURED CHEMICALS NICK PHILLIPS — AUGUST 17, 2015 Endocrine disrupting chemicals that end up in the environment are a serious concern. Research shows that they can cause adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological and immune effects in both humans and wildlife.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hoping to reduce this risk with the award last week of almost $4 million in funding to six universities. Academics will study the ecological impacts of manufactured chemicals, leading to better chemical risk assessments and decisions for protecting the environment, the agency said.

“This innovative research will provide new approaches to evaluate how chemicals influence the health of ecological systems. These approaches can help predict and, more importantly, prevent chemical impacts,” explained Thomas A. Burke, EPA science advisor and deputy assistant administrator of the agency’s Office of Research and Development.

“This knowledge will help us more effectively protect the environment from adverse impacts of chemicals over time.”

All six projects are expected to develop and apply innovative methods and models to better understand and predict the biological and ecological consequences of exposures to chemicals in the environment.

For example, researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington will receive $399,884 for work to develop a model for measuring ecological impacts of endocrine disrupting chemicals in estuaries and marine ecosystems.

Meanwhile, the University of California, Santa Barbara, plans to develop a model to enhance understanding of how the effects of exposure to chemicals are expressed within an organism.

Other projects will be undertaken at Harvard University, Michigan State University, Oregon State University and Texas Tech University.

The six STAR (Science to Achieve Results) grants are part of efforts by the EPA’s Chemical Safety for Sustainability (CSS) research program to develop new methods to improve chemical evaluation and support environmental sustainability.

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Best Practices: Shock Top Beer Pours Out Water-Saving Campaign in California Toilet Invention, Buzzfeed Partnership Part of New 'Shock the Drought' Effort Published: August 13, 2015, Smartbrief Shock Top beer is going down the toilet as part of a new causemarketing campaign in drought-stricken California. The effort, called "Shock the Drought," includes branded digital advertising urging water conservation, as well as donations to inventors developing water-saving inventions.

Shock Top campaign The first project involves an innovation called "Drop-A-Brick 2.0," which is a modern take on the old tactic of putting a brick in a toilet tank to save water. The contemporary version is made from rubber and improves flushing performance, saving an estimated 50 gallons of water per week, according to Shock Top, which is owned

by Anheuser-Busch InBev. The brand is donating $100,000 to Drop-A-Brick, allowing the inventors to automate manufacturing of the bricks, which are presently made by hand, said Ian Montgomery, co-founder of Drop-ABrick. He recently worked with San Francisco-based agency BarrettSF to create an awareness campaign. "We want to get as many free bricks out into the community as we can," Mr. Montgomery said.

Shock Top plans to identify and help fund other water-saving inventions each month through the end of the year via a partnership with crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. Other organizations involved with the campaign include water news site Water Deeply; a statewide education program called Save Our Water; and the Solano County Water Agency.

The campaign will include paid digital and out-of-home ads. That includes sponsored content on BuzzFeed. For instance, a post might include a list of things to do to save water, using BuzzFeed's typically lighthearted tone.

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Shock Top Water Tips The campaign "centers around the idea that there are easier ways ‌ to save water," said Jake Kirsch, VP of Shock Top. A website called ShockTheDrought.com includes water saving tips like "if you accidentially drop ice cubes, put them in a house plant."

Shock Top has an interest in the topic because 95% of its flagship Belgian White beer consumed in California is made in the state at A-B InBev breweries in Los Angeles and Fairfield. Also, Golden State drinkers consume one out of every four Shock Tops sold, Mr. Kirsch said, so the state is a priority for the brand.

To make one ounce of beer from start to finish takes one gallon of water, according to A-B InBev. That includes agricultural activities -such as growing hops and barley -- which come from out of state.

By comparison, wine uses two gallons of water and orange juice uses three gallons, according to the brewer.

A-B InBev's production facilities have not been subject to any statemandated water cutbacks, according to the brewer. But the company has been working to reduce water use for years.

In 2014, the L.A. brewery cut water use by 9% and the Fairfield facility reduced water use by 6.7%, and both breweries are on track to reach an additional 5% reduction by the end of 2015, according to AB InBev. MillerCoors, which also makes beer in California, reduced water use at its Irwindale brewery by 5.7% last year, following an 11.3% reduction in 2013, according to the brewer. MillerCoors is touting the reductions as part of a new consumer-facing corporate branding campaign called "We Stand for Beer" that targets cities where it has breweries.

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eBay’s 7 best practices for successful collaboration Heather Clancy Friday, October 26, 2012 - eBay and PayPal headquarters Editor's Note: To learn about eBay's data center design using Bloom Energy's fuel cells, be sure to check out VERGE@Greenbuild, November 12-13.2015

The most successful corporate sustainability initiatives are driven by internal collaboration across organizational divisions as well as partnerships with external stakeholders to share mutual goals.

That in itself isn't a new concept for GreenBiz readers, but eBay's ongoing data center expansion and related energy sourcing strategy offers a vivid example of what that really means -- and what really works.

"The more allies you have, the better," said David London, senior director for US government relations at eBay, which is the group responsible for the company's energy policy.

London participated with two of his colleagues on a panel this week in New York at the annual BSR conference on sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The other panelists were Lori Duvall, global director for eBay's Green initiatives, and Jeremy Rodriguez, distinguished engineer of data center services.

First, some background. When it comes to managing power consumption, one of eBay's biggest focuses is its data centers, which account for 55 percent to 60 percent of the San Jose, Calif.-based company's carbon emissions.

"Working for a fast growing company makes sustainable initiatives tough," Duvall said. "You need data centers, but you need to make good choices about where to put them. That is driven by cost, but you get pushed to put data centers where the power isn't particularly carbon friendly. With any luck, our footprint will grow out of necessity.

But we have to start asking ourselves -- what can we really do about it?"

The business reality is that eBay's expectations for data center reliability and latency (a fancy word for performance) pretty much trump most other concerns. Any serious e-commerce or Internet

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services provider must locate its data center in certain regions where they can have the best connections, Rodriguez said.

The catch is that many of the states that meet that siting requirement happen to be those where coal-fired power plants are particularly dominant.

Such was the case in Utah, the location for two of the company's latest data center investments – the LEED Gold certified facility in South Jordan in 2010 and another LEED Gold site planned for Draper.

So, why Utah? After all, right now, close to 94 percent of the state's electricity comes from coal.

The answer is closely tied to eBay's successful work there for the past five years with the state legislature to help reshape the state's renewable energy policy -- work that required close collaboration between the eBay data center planning team, its public policy group, the communications team, the finance department and pretty much every line-of-business head that had a stake in the new facility.

The problem was that Utah's previous energy sourcing law prevented non-utility energy consumers from buying electricity directly from renewable energy developers -- a policy that made it tough for eBay to use clean power to help control its growing carbon footprint.

"In our mind it was unacceptable for us not to have a policy for renewables," Rodriguez said.

So the company lobbied -- successfully -- to reshape that law. And in March 2012, Utah adopted a new policy -- one that makes more renewable energy available throughout the state without raising rates or taxes for Utah residents.

What was the secret to eBay's success? Here are 7 best practices that emerged from the panel discussion. They are specific to this situation, but its easy to see how they could apply broadly to pretty much any sustainability initiative.

Understand the business implications to build credibility inside and outside the company.Do the research to understand exactly how the plan could positively (or negatively) affect a product or service. "You can't just be an observer, you have to understand what the business is really about to be most effective," Duvall said.

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Get other stakeholders involved. EBay made its voice heard in Utah along with Data Center Pulse (DCP), an organization that represents more than 1,000 businesses in 66 countries. So its arguments held more economic weight -- it wasn't just eBay's 1,500 Utah jobs at stake.

Involve the communications team immediately. Rather than focus on why Utah should reduce its dependence on coal, eBay spun its messaging around the economic opportunity involved with renewable energy -- how it might attract new employers, infrastructure development and so on. At eBay, the sustainability team actually reports up through the corporate communications function. "You need to make this about competition and economic development," London said.

Identify eager internal champions who can tell the story.

Messaging should be shared internally as well as externally.If someone shares a passionate interest in the goal or cause, let him or her become an advocate, regardless of the person's exact role. "It's about finding the best people who will listen," Duvall noted. In Utah, the company kept employees closely abreast of its progress and was prepared to ask them to rally behind the company's cause if necessary (although it didn't need to do that, because the new law found overwhelming support).

Find a sympathetic legislator or public sector supporter. eBay collaborated closely with Republican State Senator Mark Madsen to do its homework, which included the formation of a working group that consisted of energy end users (like eBay and other DCP members), Rocky Mountain Power (the state’s largest electric utility), and a local renewable energy generator. All three of those stakeholders had a hand in writing Senate Bill 12, which became the foundation for the new policy.

Be patient. It took more than three years to convince Utah's major public utility that renewable energy was a worthwhile cause. But once eBay did, the company because a powerful ally.

Build on existing work. While many companies in the technology industry are secretive about their data center strategies, this is changing. "Don't be afraid to go outside your own company," 132

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Rodriguez said. "You will find someone outside your company that is just like you, facing the same problems, who may have thought about it in a different way."

Circular Economy Product Design Challenge Kicks Off September 1, 2015 Read more: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2015/09/01/circular-economy-product-designchallenge-kicks-off/#ixzz3kfc67Toh

The Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and 3D design software firm Autodesk are calling on product designers to fuel the circular economy by participating in the second Cradle to Cradle Product Design Challenge.

The challenge kicks off today and gives designers a chance to win up to $6,000 for an innovative design that creatively eliminates waste.

Submissions are due Dec. 1 and winners will be announced in January 2016. Participants are eligible to submit their design after completing the free two-hour, online course Designing Cradle to Cradle Certified Products for the Circular Economy.

Alcoa Foundation provided financial support for the course and challenge.

The circular economy and Cradle to Cradle design principles support the move to 100 percent clean energy, elimination of waste, and creation of a healthier environment for both people and planet. The design challenge tackles the issue of waste by encouraging designers to select materials that can be perpetually cycled to fuel growing global economies and to design for next use phase.

Prizes in the inaugural Cradle to Cradle Product Design Challenge, which concluded earlier this year, were awarded in three categories: Best Student Project (currently enrolled in a higher education

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program); Best Young Professional Project (working in the design profession); and Best Use of Autodesk Fusion 360. This new challenge adds an additional category: Best Use of Aluminum.

A cash prize of $2,000 will be awarded in each of the four categories.

The winner of the Fusion 360 prize will also receive a full pass to Autodesk University, an annual gathering of design, engineering and manufacturing professionals for a week of learning and networking. If the design proves worthy, judges could declare a participant winner in up to three categories, awarding the victor $6,000.

Entries will be evaluated on: design considerations that promote circularity, anticipated next life of the materials, identified path to reuse, choice of materials (non-toxic and recyclable), usefulness, and beauty.

Last year Ecover, Mosa, Trigema and I:CO won Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute awards for their products and systems encouraging recycling and reuse.

Read more: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2015/09/01/circulareconomy-product-design-challenge-kicks-off/#ixzz3kfc1FDNq

California Drought Is Made Worse by Global Warming, Scientists Say

By JUSTIN GILLISAUG. 20, 2015

Global warming caused by human emissions has most likely intensified the drought in California by 15 to 20 percent, scientists said on Thursday, warning that future dry spells in the state are almost certain to be worse than this one as the world continues to heat up.

Even though the findings suggest that the drought is primarily a consequence of natural climate variability, the scientists added that the likelihood of any drought becoming acute is rising because of climate change. The odds of California suffering droughts at the far end of the scale, like the current one that began in 2012, have roughly doubled over the past century, they said. “This would be a drought no matter what,� said A. Park Williams, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of 134

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Columbia University and the lead author of a paper published by the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “It would be a fairly bad drought no matter what. But it’s definitely made worse by global warming.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also reportedThursday that global temperatures in July had been the hottest for any month since record-keeping began in 1880, and that the first seven months of 2015 had also been the hottest such period ever. Heat waves on several continents this summer have killed thousands of people.

The paper on the California drought echoes a growing body of research that has cited the effects of human emissions, but scientists not involved in the work described it as more thorough than any previous effort because it analyzed nearly every possible combination of data on temperature, rainfall, wind speed and other factors that could be influencing the severity of the drought. The research, said David B. Lobell, a Stanford University climate scientist, is “probably the best I’ve seen on this question.”

The paper provides new scientific support for political leaders, including President Obama and Gov. Jerry Brown of California, who have cited human emissions and the resulting global warming as a factor in the drought. As he races around his battered state, from massive forest fires to parched farms, Mr. Brown has been trying to cajole the Republican presidential candidates into explaining what they would do about climate change.

“To say you’re going to ignore that there’s a huge risk here, the way we’re filling the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases, is folly, ignorance and totally irresponsible,” Mr. Brown said Thursday in a telephone interview.

“And virtually the entire Republican Party in Congress is saying exactly that. It’s inexplicable.” Several Republican presidential candidates, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, do acknowledge that climate change 135

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poses risks, but they are skeptical of the way Mr. Obama has gone about trying to limit emissions, with a planexpected to force the shutdown of many coal-fired power plants.

Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for Mr. Kasich, said Thursday that political leaders confronting questions about climate change “can’t stick their heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening. Instead we need to be about the business of taking action, but action that doesn’t throw the economy and jobs out the window at the same time.”

However, many of the leading Republican candidates are openly skeptical of climate science and play down the risks. In response to a letter from Mr. Brown asking about their plans, several of the candidates retorted last week that California should be building more dams to store water for future droughts. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said that “alarmists” about global warming were trying to gain “more power over the economy and our lives.”

A report this week by researchers at the University of California, Davis, projected that the drought would cost the California economy some $2.7 billion this year. Much of that pain is being felt in the state’s huge farming industry, which has been forced to idle a halfmillion acres and has seen valuable crops like almond trees and grape vines die.

As climate scientists analyze the origins of the drought, they have been tackling two related questions: What caused the dearth of rain and snow that began in 2012? And, regardless of the cause, how have the effects been influenced by global warming?

The immediate reason for the drought is clear enough: For more than three years, a persistent ridge of high pressure in the western Pacific Ocean has blocked storms from reaching California in the winter, when the state typically gets most of its moisture. That pattern closely resembles past California droughts.

The group led by Dr. Williams concluded that human-caused climate change was responsible for between 8 and 27 percent of the deficit in soil moisture that California experienced from 2012 to 2014.

But, in an interview, Dr. Williams said the low number was derived from a method that did not take account of the way global warming 136

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had sped up since the 1970s. That led him and his colleagues to conclude that climate change was most likely responsible for about 15 to 20 percent of the moisture deficit.

Since 1895, California has warmed by a little more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit. That increase sounds small, but as an average over an entire state in all seasons, scientists say, it is a large number. The warmer air can hold more water vapor, and the result is that however much rain or snow falls in a given year, the atmosphere will draw it out of the soil more aggressively.

“It really is quite simple,” said Richard Seager, a senior climate scientist at Lamont and a co-author on the Williams paper. “When the atmosphere is as warm as it is, the air is capable of holding far more water. So more of the precipitation that falls on the ground is evaporated, and less is in the soil, and less gets into streams.”

Dr. Williams calculated that the air over California can absorb about 8.5 trillion more gallons of water in a typical year than would have been the case in the cooler atmosphere at the end of the 19th century. The air does not always manage to soak up that much, however, because evaporation slows as the soils dry out.

How much more California will warm depends on how high global emissions of greenhouse gases are allowed to go, but scientists say efforts to control the problem have been so ineffective that they cannot rule out another 5 or 6 degrees of warming over the state in this century, a level that could turn even modest rainfall deficits into record-shattering droughts.

For politicians like Mr. Obama and Mr. Brown, the emerging question is whether Americans will awaken to the risks and demand stronger action before emissions reach such catastrophic levels.

“I don’t think climate change is anywhere near the issue that it’s going to be, but the concern is rising in the public mind,” Mr. Brown said Thursday. “The facts can’t be concealed forever.

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We can tackle climate change without wrecking the economy: Obama President Barack Obama made a forceful call for climate action Monday, calling out "the cynics and the deniers" who stand in the way of carbon regulations and warning that the failure to act would "condemn our children to a world they will no longer have the capacity to repair." Obama said the price of inaction was intolerably high, while the cost of action would be less than critics claim. "On this issue, of all issues, there is such a thing as being too late. That moment is almost upon us," he said. , The Wall Street Journal (tiered subscription model) (8/31/2015) President Obama started out persuasive Monday, patiently ticking off evidence of climate change during the first major speech of his threeday Alaska tour, but he ended up blunt, calling out “deniers” who would stand in the way of desperately needed change.

“The time to heed the critics and the cynics and the deniers is past,” he told delegates to an international conference on climate change in the Arctic. “The time to plead ignorance is surely past. Those who want to ignore the science, they are increasingly alone, they are on their own shrinking island.”

He used the backdrop of America's only Arctic state to emphasize the need for this country and others to move, and move fast, to reduce carbon emissions, to pursue cleaner energy sources and to stop relying on “unstable parts of the world” for oil.

“If we do nothing, temperatures in Alaska are projected to rise between 6 and 12 degrees by the end of the century, triggering more melting, more fires, more thawing of the permafrost. A negative feedback loop, a cycle – warming leading to more warming – that we do not want to be a part of,” he said during the final session of the State Department-sponsored event.

Obama hopes to make climate change the cornerstone of his final year and a half in office. His Alaska excursion is the kickoff to a major push to change the way the United States and other nations operate, 138

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to convince doubters that the phenomenon is real and that it can be addressed without deep economic disruption.

On Tuesday, he will tour shrinking glaciers near Seward, about 125 miles south of Anchorage. Wednesday takes him to Dillingham and discussions with local fishermen and their families. Then he will venture north of the Arctic Circle to the town of Kotzebue, which is fighting coastal erosion caused by a climate that he described in his Anchorage speech as “changing faster than our efforts to address it.”

Obama’s remarks to the GLACIER conference, attended by the foreign ministers of Arctic nations, were threaded with equal parts hope and dire warnings: Yes, it's a terrible mess. No, it is not irreparable -- with swift action.

“I have come here today, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and its second-largest emitter to say that the United States recognizes our role in creating this problem and embraces our responsibility to help solve it,” he said. “And I believe we can solve it.

“That's the good news: Even if we cannot reverse the damage that we’ve already caused, we have the means – the scientific imagination and technological innovation – to avoid irreparable harm,” he continued. “We know this because last year, for the first time in our history, the global economy grew, and global carbon emissions stayed flat. So we're making progress. We're just not making it fast enough.”

For all his powerful words and the standing ovation Obama received inside Anchorage's Dena'ina Civic and Convention Center at the GLACIER conference -- Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience -- the backdrop for his Alaska visit is tense.

As senior advisor Brian Deese told reporters before the trip, “the president has been pretty clear about his long-term vision for our nation’s energy sector. He believes that America needs to lead and 139

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the world needs to lead in transitioning to an energy system based on carbon-0 renewable energy.”

Still, environmentalists are wary of the man who just allowed Royal Dutch Shell to begin limited offshore oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea. An online petition by the group Credo Action sends the angry message: “Climate leaders don't drill the Arctic.”

Early response to the speech was mixed. Margaret Williams, managing director for Arctic programs at the World Wildlife Fund, supported his trip to Alaska, which she said shines a light on climate change's serious threat. But she hopes what Obama sees will motivate him too, she said.

“Building resilient communities based on clean energy and jobs, protecting our wildlife and landscapes, and securing the culture and prosperity of Arctic communities are the building blocks of the Arctic’s future,” Williams said in a written statement. “As President Obama continues to push for meaningful climate action, it’s critical he make these fundamentals a priority for his administration.”

Greenpeace called on the president to “show courage and leadership,” to stop Shell and to put a moratorium on future offshore drilling in the Arctic.

Mt. McKinley, America's tallest peak, is getting back its original name: Denali “President Obama emphasized two things during his speech in Alaska: the urgency of climate change and the possibility of solving it,” said Mary Nicol, Greenpeace senior Arctic campaigner. “But it’s time for the president to stop talking about urgency, and stop approving extreme fossil fuel projects like Shell’s Arctic drilling plans. In fact, the approval of that very project undermines every other bold move the president has made on climate change.”

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A coalition of groups including Greenpeace and Alaska Rising Tide rallied Monday blocks from the convention center where Obama spoke. The groups are demanding an end to offshore Arctic drilling and a rapid transition to renewable energy sources.

Protesters in polar bear costumes lolled on a long grassy park as others waved signs proclaiming, “People for the Ethical Treatment of Alaska” and “Our Future Must Be Renewable.” Animal welfare organizations have launched an ad campaign “to ensure that an increasingly ice-free Arctic will not become a thoroughfare for trade in commercial whale products.”

Then there are those who argue that Obama hasn't done enough to allow for the extraction of this cash-strapped state's abundant natural resources, including oil, natural gas and minerals key to manufacturing.

Gov. Bill Walker, who flew in with Obama on Air Force One, is among that group.

In a news conference last week about the president's visit, Walker told reporters that “one of the major messages to the president is the fact that we have an excellent pipeline in Alaska, except it's threequarters empty. And so I'll talk to him about what we need to do to put more oil in the pipeline, more access we need to have to our resources.”

Talking to reporters on the plane trip west, Walker said he thanked the president for allowing Shell to drill in the Chukchi Sea and said he is confident the oil giant will proceed safely. He wants to see “revenue sharing from the offshore – we don’t get any money at all from it.”

And he said his state is “excited to have a president come up and it’s actually a destination, it’s not just a low-on-fuel stop.”

Earlier Monday, Obama noted that his administration had heeded Alaskans' pleas to change the name of North America's tallest peak from Mt. McKinley to its original name, Mt. Denali.

By the time Air Force One landed at Alaska's Joint Base ElmendorfRichardson, the National Park Service had already begun printing new maps of Denali National Park, wiping all traces of the 25th president from the cartographic record.

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“It's not an arbitrary change,” Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters, referring to the dethroning of former President William McKinley, a native of Ohio. “In fact, this is an effort to align the policies of the federal government with what Alaskan natives have referred to that way for thousands of years.”

In a nod to opponents, Earnest said the Interior Department “will work with leaders in Ohio ... to find an appropriate way to acknowledge President McKinley’s contribution to our country.”

Will carbon-sucking technologies prove cost-effective?

The controversial quest to stop climate change by pulling carbon out of the air Technologies aimed at removing carbon dioxide from the air directly are almost ready for prime time, but it remains to be seen whether they'll prove commercially viable, says Noah Deich, founder of the Center for Carbon Removal.

"It's not a question of if we can take carbon out of the atmosphere, but I think the question is if all of the technologies that can take carbon out of the atmosphere do it in a cost-effective, sustainable and scalable way? It may be too expensive to work”

By Thor Benson on August 19, 2015 Most efforts at combating climate change have focused on reducing carbon emissions or trying to eliminate them, but many climate scientists believe we may have already passed the point of no return.

That’s why Noah Deich wants to pull carbon out of the air.

"NOT ONLY CAN WE STOP MAKING A MESS, WE CAN CLEAN IT UP."

Deich is the founder of a nonprofit called the Center for Carbon Removal; its goal is to bring together scientists, political figures and leaders in the energy industries to find the best way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. "Not only can we stop making a mess, but we

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can clean it up and hopefully prevent all of the damages scientists expect will happen if we don’t clean it up," he says.

Carbon removal schemes aren’t new, and they aren’t entirely supported by the scientific community, either. Some groups of scientists are working on the problem, and documents like the one published by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urge developing this kind of technology in the future. One major barrier is cost. Technology already exists to remove CO2 from smokestacks at a reasonable price, but taking it out of the air raises the price — just how much, though, is disputed.

"It’s not a question of if we can take carbon out of the atmosphere, but I think the question is if all of the technologies that can take carbon out of the atmosphere do it in a cost effective, sustainable and scalable way," Deich says. He believes we can find a cost effective method.

ONE THING IS FOR SURE: THE AMOUNT OF CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE IS RISING

One thing is for sure: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. Currently, the level of CO2 is just over 400 parts per million — so 400 CO2 molecules for every million gas molecules. It doesn’t sounds like a lot, but scientists say that small changes in the balance can have major impacts. Concentrations of carbon dioxide are projected to almost double to 750 parts per million by 2100, according to research from MIT. Those levels are alarmingly high, since carbon dioxide was at 280 ppm before the industrial revolution picked up in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

THE UN'S GOAL FOR CO2 EMISSIONS IS CURRENTLY UNREALISTICThe UN’s goal is to keep CO2 from going over 450ppm in the next century, in the hopes of avoiding the likely catastrophic effects of climate change. That goal currently appears unrealistic,thanks to a lack of investment in the technology and the continued global reliance on fossil fuels, according to many climate scientists. Deals among members of the United Nations could help, but they will have to be swift and unyielding to prevent catastrophic consequences. The largest industrial nations will not just have to

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promise to try to cut emissions by large numbers, they will have to meet those goals and even try to exceed them.

In terms of technological help, a machine made to pull carbon dioxide out of the air is crucial, says Deich. Recently, just such a machine made headlines: it pulls CO2 out of the air, processes it and combines it with hydrogen to make hydrocarbons so the CO2 can be used as fuel. There are also ideas for storing carbon in soils that can absorb it. "This is really an untapped area for technology innovation," Deich said.

LACKNER BELIEVES HIS METHODS COULD HELP STOP CLIMATE CHANGE

One method for carbon removal, created by Klaus Lackner, who is the director at the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, uses sodium carbonate and a resin material to suck up carbon from the air like a plant’s or tree’s leaves do. The resin soaks up the CO2 like a sponge, and the carbon can be removed by adding water in a vacuum sealed container. Then, the CO2 can be pumped underground, in a process called sequestration.

Lackner believes his methods could help stop climate change. He says it’s not likely the atmosphere can handle "800 or 1,000 ppm of CO2, and we will likely get there this century if we don’t do anything about it," Lackner told The Verge. "We will need to balance the system out and find a way to get negative emissions."

Much of the scientific community doesn’t especially care for carbon capture. Many researchers who are working on promoting green energy or planning on capturing the CO2 directly from smoke stacks don’t want a technology that lets people pollute as much as they want so it can be captured later, Lackner says. But plenty of fossil fuels are burned without carbon capture — in planes, ships, and automobiles, for instance — so we will eventually have to capture what’s already in the atmosphere, he says. The real issue is affordability.

THE REAL ISSUE IS AFFORDABILITYPeople like Lackner are hopeful that carbon capture can be made cheap quickly. But that may not be possible. For instance, there’s Sherwood’s plot, a graph that shows how much it will cost to handle a certain volume of material based on how diluted it is. It’s a straight line upward for cost as the 144

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material is more diluted. CO2 is 300 times more diluted in air than it is in a smoke stack, according to Lackner. With the cost of taking it out of a smokestack running around $80 to $100 per ton of CO2, it would conceivably be incredibly expensive to take it out of the air. Most estimates for the cost of open air carbon capture range between $200 per ton and $1,000 per ton of CO2.

Lackner wants to find his way around the plot’s skyward trajectory.

He agrees with the basic idea behind Sherwood’s plot — that a more dilute substance costs more to capture — but he thinks he can disrupt the linear growth in cost. The way to do that, according to Lackner, is by not forcing the machine to actively seek out carbon dioxide. His device lets CO2 come to it, instead of grabbing everything around in an attempt to find CO2, as its first step of the process— think of it as standing in the wind, rather than sucking in large volumes of air. Designs that allow this type of airflow could get the cost down to $5 or $10 per ton of CO2 captured, Lackner says.

But Lackner’s estimates sharply contrast what some studies of carbon capture devices, which usually estimate capture’s minimum cost as around $200–$400 per ton. Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at MIT, was one of the researchers who helped conduct a 2011 study that looked at the cost of capturing carbon from outside air. His team based their research on the devices that would capture carbon from smoke stacks, and using Sherwood’s plot, they found an open air machine would likely cost $1,000 per ton of CO2 captured at this point. However, Lackner’s device isn’t the same as the device used to get CO2 from smokestacks, so this estimate may not directly reflect that cost.

Sherwood's plot (Gutowski et. al) There are ways that cost can be driven down, but the overall volume of the air that needs to 145

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be handled and how diluted the CO2 is makes it an expensive process, Herzog says. "If you have basically free electricity [for the device], then that changes things, but I just don’t see that happening anytime soon," he says. One of the biggest issues is how much energy a machine needs to capture carbon, so very cheap electricity will be key. Even technologies that are often called free energy, like solar panels, typically cost at least 12 cents per kilowatt hour — and that’s still too expensive. It’s important that the air capture device be running on energy not created by burning much fossil fuels, otherwise you’re just "chasing your tail," Herzog says.

COST IS THE BIGGEST HINDRANCE TO CARBON CAPTURECost is the biggest hindrance to carbon capture — everyone agrees on that, even if they disagree about how expensive it will actually be.

Once some groups have built their devices to scale and fully tested them in a large area, the reality of these devices will be a little clearer.

Right now, prototypes have only been tried out in test facilities, with little reported but estimated costs and basic efficacy. Initial tests show many devices capture at least half the CO2 they come in contact with, but they’re still pricey to develop and use. But these devices haven’t been tested much, so that’s hardly the final word. Proponents of carbon removal devices claim they are a necessity to help clean up our mess — but necessity doesn’t determine a technology’s success.

As more prototypes are tested, we may actually find out if we can clean up after ourselves — and at what cost.

Falcon Waterfree Technologies has launched watersaving hybrid urinal technology to the US new construction market.

Water Saving Urinal Technogy Industry-wide high-efficiency urinal (HEU) adoption now allows plumbing fixtures to respond to nationwide severe drought by minimizing flush volumes, the company says. However, new research has demonstrated that supplemental water flows help keep the pipes 146

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behind HEUs clean. Falcon’s hybrid urinal technology uses this insight and periodically sends a large volume of water through the pipe system behind waterfree urinals.

This patented technology functions as waterfree in daily use and automatically performs a full gallon (4 liter) flush of the urinal and pipe system every 72 hours instead of trickling a small volume of water with each use like other HEUs. Falcon’s hybrid urinal technology’s automatic flush only uses 102 gallons of water a year no matter how many people use the fixture.

Falcon’s hybrid technology provides maximum United States Green Building Council LEED points and consistent and quantifiable water savings for sustainability professionals or those responding to drought conditions.

The company estimates its existing technology has saved a total of 20 billion gallons of water over the last 10 years Read more: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2015/08/21/falcon-launches-water-saving-hybrid-urinaltechnology/#ixzz3jcXoJ5pc

Fracking Water Management Market Remains Buoyant Frac Water Treatment Market Still Worth $1.9 Billion Even though a dramatic decline in global oil prices has led to a fall in fracking activity, water reuse in areas like the Marcellus Shale is still in demand, says Lux Research.

NICK PHILLIPS — AUGUST 17, 2015 The decline in global oil prices has led to a significant drop in hydraulic fracturing activity, but the value of the fracking water management market remains at $1.9 billion, not including water transportation and disposal.

That’s according to a report by Lux Research, which says that water reuse in areas like the Marcellus Shale is still in demand.

Across the United States, the number of fracs fell from about 2,300 in October 2014 to 1,350 in February 2015 as oil and gas companies

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shifted strategy to focus on their core regions and most economic resources.

But at the same time, operators have turned to new technologies to tighten up their water management strategies and to lower costs. In addition, new regulations in the United States could bring in stricter oversight of water transportation and disposal and lead to more extensive water recycling, Lux Research pointed out.

The Rigzone website, reporting on the research, noted that there are two different water management trends in North America. In the western United States, operators primarily dispose of fracking wastewater rather than treat it. As much as 95 percent of water in the Eagle Ford region goes into disposal wells.

Lux Research found that operators in Texas have access to nearly 1,000 times as many in-state disposal wells as their counterparts in the Marcellus Shale. Nevertheless, operators are aware that they may not always have cheap and available water and are starting to explore treatment technologies and management strategies.

In the Marcellus region in the east, disposal is far more costly and about two-thirds of water used in hydraulic fracturing is treated and reused.

The research report is titled Surviving the Shakeout in Frac Water Treatment Technologies.

“No single technology or water management approach will win in the frac water treatment space. Rather, companies will employ a mixture of water disposal, centralized treatment and onsite treatment using physical, thermal and electrochemical methods,” said Brent Giles, Lux Research Director and one of the authors of the report titled, “Surviving the Shakeout in Frac Water Treatment Technologies.”

“Companies like Saltworks Technologies have found ways to incrementally improve established technologies to address pain points in a given geography, while new players like BitPetroClean see an opportunity in niche markets,” he added.

Lux Research analysts evaluated water management opportunities in the changed landscape for fraccing, and rated 19 water treatment companies on the Lux Innovation Grid. Among their findings:

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Saltworks, Memsys lead in thermal treatment. Saltworks and Memsys placed in the “Dominant” quadrant on the Lux Innovation Grid. Both are exploring combined thermal and membrane systems to alleviate corrosion issues caused by high temperatures and treat wastewater.

• WaterTectonics branches out from Halliburton deal. WaterTectonics, which gained notoriety through an exclusive partnership with Halliburton, is the sole “Dominant” company among electrocoagulation providers. The company is actively exploring related markets such as offshore water treatment.

• BioPetroClean tops in oil recovery. In the absence of a “Dominant” player, BioPetroClean is the highest-rated company among oil recovery and removal companies. Rated “High potential,” BioPetroClean focuses on degrading the last traces of oil that are not currently economical to recover.

The report, titled “Surviving the Shakeout in Frac Water Treatment Technologies,” is part of the Lux Research Water Intelligence and the Exploration and Production Intelligence services.

ABOUT LUX RESEARCH Lux Research provides strategic advice and ongoing intelligence for emerging technologies. Leaders in business, finance and government rely on us to help them make informed strategic decisions. Through our unique research approach focused on primary research and our extensive global network, we deliver insight, connections and competitive advantage to our clients.

Visit www.luxresearchinc.com for more information.

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The Intersection of Water, Energy and Climate Adnan Z. Amin Become a fan IRENA Director-General, 24/08/2015 Renewables can cut down on global water use, IRENA leader says Renewables are a valuable tool for reducing water use around the world, writes IRENA Director General Adnan Amin. Forty-four percent 149

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of the water used in the EU goes to energy production. Meanwhile, renewables such as wind don't use any water to produce energy. The American Wind Energy Association says that in 2014, wind energy saved 13 billion gallons of water in Texas and 68 billion gallons across the US. "Low-cost, low-carbon, water-saving renewable energy is increasingly seen as the key to ushering in a sustainable energy future on a global scale," Amin writes. The Huffington Post (8/24) This week, global experts gather in Stockholm for World Water Week amidst a backdrop of water-related crises worldwide. The U.S. state of California is experiencing a record-breaking four-year drought.

Brazil and South Africa have electricity, water and food supply shortages due to low precipitation. Puerto Rico residents are also feeling the pinch, with rations limiting tap water access to just twice a week. This issue of water and climate change is central in this week's discussions, with the UN Climate Change Conference set to negotiate a global climate action agreement beginning in just three months.

While renewable energy is widely acknowledged as an important tool to mitigate climate change, its role in water conservation is not so recognized. Water is an essential ingredient in the energy production process. In the EU for example, energy production accounts for 44 percent of total water use. Conversely, energy is also needed to process water for consumption. By 2050, the global population will demand roughly 80 percent more energy and 55 percent more water than today. Meeting these growing demands is a tremendous challenge, given competing needs for limited resources amid heightened climate change effects.

This is where renewable energy has a role to play in the waterenergy-climate nexus. During power generation, solar power withdraws 200 times less water than a coal power plant to produce the same amount of electricity. Wind power requires no water. IRENA analysis finds that doubling the share of renewable energy, in particular solar PV and wind, could reduce water withdrawals in the power sector as much as 52 percent in the UK, 37 percent in the US, 32 percent in Australia, 28 percent in Germany and 12 percent in 150

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India. The European Wind Energy Association found that wind energy in the EU avoided the use of 387 billion litres of water in 2012 -equivalent to the average annual water use of 3 million EU households -- and the American Wind Energy Association found that wind energy saved 257 billion litres of water nationwide in 2014, 13 billion alone in the drought-prone state of Texas.

Achieving the massive scale-up of renewable energy needed has never been more achievable than it is right now. Renewable energy has beat out fossil fuels as the cheapest source of power in many parts of the world. We also have the technology and the means to integrate variable renewable energy technologies into the electricity grid, creating jobs along the way. The business case for renewable energy as a water-saving mechanism is also strong. In a Carbon Disclosure Project survey of Global 500 companies, 82 percent of energy companies and 73 percent of utilities found that water shortages were a substantial risk to business operations and 59 percent of energy companies and 67 percent of utilities had experienced water-related business impacts in the past five years.

Low-cost, low-carbon, water-saving renewable energy is increasingly seen as the key to ushering in a sustainable energy future on a global scale. In the U.S., President Obama recently revised his clean power plan, which places significant emphasis on wind and solar power along with other renewable energy sources, to displace coal-fired power plants and cut greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power stations by nearly a third within 15 years. In Sweden, the government is proposing a 5 Terawatt increase of the production of renewable energy by 2020 -- equivalent to the electricity consumption of one million Swedish homes. China is targeting a massive 200 Gigawatts (GW) of onshore wind power and 100 GW of solar PV by 2020. India has committed to 100 GW of solar PV and 40 GW of wind by 2022.

Worldwide, 164 countries now have renewable energy targets, up from just 43 countries in 2005.

In our globalized world, everything is interconnected. Water, energy and climate can no longer be thought of as separate issues. The only effective, immediately available solution to meet the rising demand for water and energy, while also mitigating climate change, is to scale up 151

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renewable energy and phase out fossil fuels. This shift is happening, but not fast enough. It's now up to global policy makers, governments, investors and the private sector to build on the growing momentum and throw their weight behind the ongoing global energy system transformation for the benefit of our economy, our society and our environment.

A brief history of global climate negotiations Is the world better suited for an agreement than it was in 2009?

The Copenhagen climate talks of 2009 didn't yield the kind of global deal activists had been hoping for -- but this year's negotiations in Paris could prove more fruitful, writes Fiona Harvey. "In the lead-up to Paris, the most valuable commodity will be the willingness of the world’s governments to come to a deal. Whether this has changed since the Copenhagen talks remains to be seen," she writes. Ensia (7/27) AS WE PREPARE FOR THE UN CLIMATE TALKS, A LOOK AT WHAT’S CHANGED SINCE COPENHAGEN July 27, 2015 — Editor’s note: 2015 is shaping up to be a pivotal year with respect to climate change as growing concern about impacts converges with a critical stage in the decadeslong process of shaping an international agreement to change our trajectory.

To help us all prepare for the potentially game-changing 21st gathering of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 21) in Paris beginning Nov. 30, Ensia is publishing a series of context pieces from longtime observer and reporter Fiona Harvey. This third installment describes the fascinating, at times frustrating, at times fruitful trajectory that has brought us to this pivotal point today.

This year will mark the most important negotiations on climate change since the 15th gathering of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in 152

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Copenhagen in 2009, COP 15. Those talks ended up with progress on several important fronts, such as getting developed and developing countries to jointly agree on emissions targets for the first time, but were marred by scenes of chaos in the final hours and bitter recriminations among governments.

No one wants to repeat the experience of Copenhagen — least of all the French government, which, as host to this year’s gathering, is determined to wring commitments from governments well in advance of the start of the talks in order to be sure of getting a deal.

The world has changed markedly since 2009, with key developments in science, geopolitical shifts and a new focus on climate change that all put this year’s crunch conference in a far different context from the last one. As we prepare for COP 21, it’s worth examining some of the most important of these changes and considering how those differences might influence the tenor of the talks and, ultimately, the outcome.

New Knowledge First is the expansion of our scientific knowledge. Thanks to ongoing work from thousands of researchers around the world, we now know even more than we did in 2009 about the workings of climate change, its probable future impacts and what we need to do to avoid the most damaging consequences.

That is the good news. The bad news is that the warnings from leading scientists are growing ever more urgent.

Copenhagen was informed by the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of the world’s leading climate scientists, which summarized the state of our knowledge at that time. The 2007 report found that global warming was occurring with a 90 percent certainty that the cause was largely our burning of fossil fuels and disruption of natural systems. It also set out predictions for future warming and its consequences.

Temperatures would rise by between about 1.8 °C (3.2 °F) to about 4 °C (7 °F) by the end of the century, the scientists posited. This would take warming to more than the symbolically important 2 °C (3.6 °F) over preindustrial levels that scientists estimate is a probable key

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threshold of the climate system, beyond which aspects of climate change are likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.

The fifth IPCC assessment report, published in 2013–14, has refined projections for changes in sea level and ice melt due to global warming.

The most recent IPCC report was published in three parts in 2013 and 2014, with summaries meant to help inform policy-makers. The findings strengthened the science reported in 2007, with an elevated certainty — now 95 percent — that warming has a human cause and refinements on projections for changes in sea level, ice melt, upper atmosphere warming and other parameters.

Two things stood out above the other findings: an examination of the so-called “pause” in global warming, so much talked about in recent years, and estimates of the world’s “carbon budget,” or the amount of greenhouse gas that can safely be released into the atmosphere if the 2 °C limit is not to be exceeded.

On the “pause,” the IPCC warned that there was still too little data to decide the cause of the slight slowdown in the upward march of global temperatures in the past 10 to 15 years. Periods of slower rise in temperatures are to be expected because of natural variations, it noted, and there may be other causes. “Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850,” the report observed. “In the northern hemisphere, 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1,400 years.” Temperature trends could only be reliably observed over periods of about 30 years, the scientists said.

The IPCC’s estimate of a carbon budget found that about half of the carbon that we can emit and stay within 2 °C has already been released into the atmosphere.New science on the pause has come forward that was not in time to be included in the IPCC report. This includes studies showing that a likely cause is the increased absorption of heat by the oceans. Further studies will undoubtedly

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follow: This year’s temperatures are once again breaking records, indicating the pause may be ending.

The IPCC’s estimate of a carbon budget found that about half of the carbon that we can emit and stay within 2 °C has already been released into the atmosphere. This is crucial because, for the first time, it gives a clear idea of what we can safely do in producing further emissions. On current trends, we would use up the remaining budget in about three decades.

In the context of the COP talks, carbon budgets are highly controversial, because they suggest that the atmosphere could be “carved up” into finite portions of carbon emissions that could be allocated to rich and poor nations. That issue is fraught with notions of equity that will be impossible to resolve before Paris, and perhaps ever. However, even if policy-makers refuse to be bound to considerations of a carbon budget, the issue — and the IPCC’s calculation — will loom over the talks.

One further note on the IPCC: The impact of the Fourth Assessment Report on the 2009 talks was marred by the“Climategate” scandal that erupted just before the summit. Hackers found emails from IPCC scientists supposedly showing them disguising key data, and quickly afterward a handful of flaws were found in the report itself. Although the errors did not have large ramifications — and, as the scientists noted, were few relative to the overall length and complexity of the report — they were damaging to the IPCC’s public image.

The IPCC has learned from this experience, and no errors have yet been reported in the latest update. It remains to be seen whether hackers and their backers have further tricks up their sleeves ahead of Paris.

Emissions Trends At the same time scientific warnings on the need to make urgent cuts in emissions have intensified, global emissions have continued to rise in most of the intervening years. The International Energy Agency reported a small fall in emissions from energy in 2009, after the financial crisis. Afterward, the upward trend resumed until 2013, when 155

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falling coal use in China resulted in a stalling of emissions growth. It remains to be seen whether this was a temporary blip or a more concerted “decoupling” of carbon from economic growth.

China has joined the “rich club” since Copenhagen, with per-capita carbon emissions recently exceeding those of Europe for the first time.

Another important emissions milestone was reached recently: China’s per capita carbon emissions exceeded those of Europe for the first time. Per capita emissions are important because many in the developing world regard them as a fairer measure than gross aggregate emissions, so for China to join the rich club in this respect marks yet further divergence of its interests from many smaller developing countries.

While emissions have risen since Copenhagen, technology has also advanced. Renewable energy sources have come down rapidly in price, to make wind and solar, at least in the most favorable cases, competitive with fossil fuel electricity generation. The widespread use of fracking in the U.S. has meant the world’s second biggest emitter is on track to reducing the intensity of its emissions from energy use.

However, the rise of fracking should be viewed with caution: Poorly managed fracking facilities can leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and shale oil, to which many frackers are turning, is much more emissions-intensive than shale gas. Meanwhile, on a separate energy front, the turning away from nuclear energy in Japan and Germany after the 2011 Fukushima incident is raising concerns that these countries will be forced to use more fossil fuels, chiefly coal. The full implications of this have yet to be seen.

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since Copenhagen, so has deployment of renewable energy technologies.

Political, Economic and Social Shifts The world has moved on politically as well since the Copenhagen talks. The clearest sign of this came in the joint announcement late last year of commitments on greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest emitters. The U.S. will reduce its emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, while China will target a peaking of its emissions by 2030.

This development marks a clear difference from Copenhagen: The willingness of China to share a stage with the U.S. and to talk about a peak year herald significant progress toward reaching a deal.

Businesses are taking note, with many preparing to announce new climate initiatives ahead of Paris. On economics, too, we have seen more studies arguing that tackling climate change can be a boon to economies and showing how to achieve the changes necessary to stay within the carbon budget while enjoying the fruits of prosperity.

The New Climate Economy project, led by Felipe Calderon, expresident of Mexico, has been a key mover in this debate. Climate finance — the assistance provided by rich countries to poorer ones to help them cut emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change — has also ramped up, with development banks taking a leading role and leveraging private sector funds.

Businesses are taking note, with many preparing to announcenew climate initiatives ahead of Paris. The insurance industry, which takes a long-term view of risks, has been pushing for action. Recently, six major European oil and gas companies offered to collaborate on a carbon price. While some might argue these businesses may have motives other than concern for the world’s poor under global warming, the actions they take could be significant.

Other positive signals in the last year have included massive rallies, such as last year’s People’s Climate March in New York, and the growing movement urging individuals, institutions and businesses to divest from fossil fuels. That movement is likely to gather further pace before the Paris meeting.

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Prominent public figures have also been playing an increasing role, with the most significant intervention, the encyclical Pope Francis released this spring, emphasizing the moral dimension of tackling climate change. The move attracted applause but also criticism from some climate skeptics who accused the pope of interfering in a matter of science.

Moreover, this fall, in advance of the Paris talks, the U.N. and world governments are preparing to set out Sustainable Development Goals to take over for the Millennium Development Goals that expire this year. The SDGs will have climate change not as an add-on, but as a core issue, because of its wide-ranging effects on issues from water scarcity to agricultural productivity, gender equity and human migration. The effort going into the SDGs, which are viewed as crucial by development experts, will have a beneficial effect on the battle against climate change.

Perceptions and Trends While many of the developments in the past six years appear to bode well for Paris, there have also developed a number of perceptions that could jeopardize both an agreement and our ability to tackle climate change.

Most important was that of Copenhagen itself, which was widely painted as a total failure, despite the progress achieved there. The talks have never managed to throw off that shroud of negativity, and this puts the stakes at Paris as high as they can be. If COP 21 fails, it is hard to see how the U.N. process can limp on.

The perception of a pause in global warming is another serious problem, because it has allowed climate skeptics to claim that warming is not happening or is happening so slowly that it is not worth bothering about. This has now become common currency for many people. Scientists are clear that this analysis is not accurate: The world is still heating up, and there are good reasons to think the small slowdown in the rise in temperatures is temporary, probably caused by the absorption of heat by the oceans.

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Development Mechanism — by which rich countries offset their emissions by financing projects such as solar power and wind farms in the poor world — has suffered a series of blows and is looking moribund, following the near-collapse of the EU’s emissions trading scheme. If such offsets are to continue to 2020 and beyond, they badly need a shot in the arm at Paris. Otherwise, new means of channeling climate funds must be proven to work.

Among the changes since Copenhagen: Human population reached 7 billion.

Yet another trend that differentiates the setting for COP 21 from that of COP 15 is the recent increase in coal consumption. “Party time for coal” is how one energy trader has characterized the past few years, as tumbling prices and rising use have led to a resurgence in the fortunes of this carbon-intensive fuel in many parts of the world. The result has been, particularly in poor countries, the building of more inefficient, old-style coal-fired power stations. Leading bodies such as the International Energy Agency and the OECD have warned that this is probably the most serious threat to tackling climate change, and it may not be solved by the Paris talks. When new coal-fired power stations are built, they are likely to continue operating for as long as half a century, locking the world in to high levels of emissions.

Finally, two years after Copenhagen, the world passed an important milestone: Human population reached 7 billion. The sheer complexity of ensuring all are fed, have decent lives and opportunities, and are lifted out of poverty increases as our numbers increase. Many scientists argue it is perfectly possible to achieve these goals without breaking through climate thresholds, but it will be tough.

In the lead-up to Paris, the most valuable commodity will be the willingness of the world’s governments to come to a deal. Whether this has changed since the Copenhagen talks remains to be seen.

Many of the signs are pointing in that direction, but ultimately the choice of whether to listen to scientists, citizens and businesses lies with ministers and their leaders.

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The truth that gets washes away in Water Business The Hindu, August 17, 2015 The demand for a reverse osmosis water filter device has been growing in my household. Has our existing water filter stopped being friendly? has been my consistent query. It is time we got a new one has been the standard response. Considered to be one of that generation to whom the utility of a product carries a lot of meaning, listing the virtues of new technology has often been used as a technique to floor my persistence. This time, however, I decided not to give up easily.

Far from comparing designs and checking price levels, I set out to find out from actual users their experience of using RO filters. What got me into a serious investigation of the reverse osmosis system was a simple observation from a neighbours wife who told me that for each litre of filtered water, her domestic RO filter dumped three to four litres as waste water. Isnt it a significant ratio given that potable water is becoming scarce?

With a background of some sorts in engineering, I sought to get to the root of the problem. What I learnt is both revealing as well as shocking to an extent.

Shocking, because threat perceptions related to water-borne diseases have led many people to put money into water purifying systems, and Revealing, because, the hidden cost of wasting water by blindly adopting a technology has gone unnoticed.

Public water supply continues to evoke little confidence in terms of quality.

No wonder, the domestic water filter market has come knocking on every door. Celebrity endorsements have pepped up the market that is expected to grow to a high of Rs. 7,000 crore over the next couple of years. The growth has been at a rate of more than 22 per cent a year. The RO systems represent a major share in this.

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The market is known to exploit public sentiment, often with little regard to ethics and morality. That is how the market has shaped and grown.

The question that comes to mind is whether the technology is so designed as to waste water, or is the user at fault in its application?

I would imagine it is both: the markets for not letting the user know the inherent weakness of the technology, and the consumer for being cosy with his or her ignorance.

What is the inherent nature of the reverse osmosis system? It was invented in 1949 by researchers from the universities of California and Florida, where the technique was employed to produce potable water from sea water. Pressure is applied to force sea water through a micro-sieve, which retains the dissolved salts and allows pure water to pass through it to the other side. The water left behind is often a highly concentrated solution.

Further interaction with friends and colleagues led me to conclude that wherever piped water or tanker supply is brackish, the use of a reverse osmosis filter alone can rid water of excess salts. However, in areas where the supplied water is not loaded with dissolved salts, ordinary filters that primarily use activated charcoal to remove impurities should suffice.

If RO water filters are used in cases where they should not be used, it acts like a double-edged sword. Not only does water get wasted, though not as much as in the case of brackish water, but also the RO filter sequesters every molecule of salt from the water and turns it bland in the process. Consuming such depleted water can be hazardous to health, especially for toddlers and growing children.

Since water supplied in the colony where we live is not brackish, it may not do any good to us if we opt for an RO filter. If every household in the 250-households colony were to use RO filters, consuming 100 litres a day, the cumulative daily wastage could be to the tune of no less than 25,000 litres, assuming that for each litre that is filtered through RO at least two litres get wasted.

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The story does not end there. The concentrated waste water thus drained adds to contamination of the drainage system. We can easily ignore this, but can we be oblivious to the fact that fresh water is getting scarcer by the day? With increase in population on the one hand and wastage of water on the other, the annual per capita availability has declined to a low of 1,500 cubic metres. This puts India among countries that are water stressed.

While we have finally taken a decision not to go for an RO filter at home, my advice to others who have no option but to use an RO filter is to use the discarded water to wash utensils or mop the floor. A small tank could be attached to the RO filter to collect such water for alternative use. Till such time the RO technology stops generating waste water, we have little option but to use a technology that wastes water. Consumer education is critical to the adoption of any technology. sudhirendarsharma@gmail.com

Climate change is something business can fix Zach Bernstein Tuesday, August 25, 2015 Probably one of the oddest statements you hear in politics nowadays is “I’m not a scientist.” The idea, of course, is that because politicians aren’t climate scientists, they’re not qualified to say that climate change is real.

Of course, you don’t have to be a scientist to know climate change is real — although the vast majority of climate scientists do know that — or to understand how its effects, such as extreme weather or damaging heat waves, can be devastating to businesses and the economy.

That’s why the introduction earlier this month of the final Clean Power Plan is such an important event — because it represents the single biggest step the U.S. government has taken to deal with climate

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change. But to make it work, states will need to step up in a big way — and the business community will need to push for that to happen.

Addition by subtraction Overall, the final rule will require 32 percent reductions in carbon emissions by 2030, using 2005 levels of carbon dioxide as a baseline — an easier threshold to meet than current levels, whichcontinue to rise on a yearly basis. But that reduction is the national aggregate. Go down to the state level, and things change considerably.

Each state will have its own emission reduction threshold to meet, based on factors such as the number of oil and coal plants and the potential for increased renewable energy installation.

That’s why some states will have very low goals to meet — for example, Idaho at 10 percent reduction and Connecticut at 7 percent have the lowest bars to reach. (Alaska and Hawaii, as non-contiguous states, have not been given targets yet; Vermont does not have a target because it has no coal-fired plants.)

Best of all, states get to decide how to meet the targets. States such as the Dakotas, which have some of the highest emissions reductions, also have some of the fastest wind speeds in the country, making wind energy an attractive choice for them. Others could invest in renewables such as solar, hydropower or biomass, or through energy efficiency.

States even have the option to join together in a regional energy market, similar to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the Northeast.

This all sounds great, right? Well, there are still a few problems.

State of play Sixteen states, many of which receive the vast majority of their electricity from coal, are suing the EPA to try to overturn the rule. This isn’t new, either; 15 states previously had sued to block the rule before it was even finalized, but the courts dismissed that suit.

Even if the EPA wins, some — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — have urged states to simply refuse to develop a plan.

There are a few reasons why his idea is terrible. For one thing, states that don’t set up their own plans will have to use one created by the 163

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EPA — and there’s a good chance that those states will see bigger energy rate hikes than if they created their own.

The bigger risk, however, is that states refusing to commit to a plan will limit the rule’s effectiveness, not just for dealing with climate change but also for improving economic growth.

Because the EPA is limited in how much authority it would have to curb emissions — under the Clean Air Act, it may be able to curb only emissions from coal-fired power plants, not require states to invest in renewables or energy efficiency — a federal plan would be leaving those other tactics unused. Those cleaner energy sources are not only crucial for economic growth; they’re also key tools for fighting climate change.

The business of cutting carbon Considering how many people have claimed these rules will be jobkillers, small businesses might be the last people you’d expect to back these rules. But national, scientific polling released by ASBC last year confirms that they’re on board: 64 percent of small business owners nationwide said government regulation was needed to reduce carbon emissions from power plants.

That may not make a lot of sense at first, until you consider another result from the same poll: 53 percent of small business owners believed climate change adversely would affect their businesses. Nearly one in five said it already had.

We’ve written in the past about how there’s really not as much of a gap between liberals and conservatives on climate change as one might think. Yes, there’s differences of opinion on the solutions, but having people sit down and talk together makes it clear there is actually broad agreement on climate change being a real economic threat. What we need now is for policymakers at all levels of government to realize that.

Business people can help. One is to tell their governors to develop a plan instead of stalling.

Another is to attend the ASBC Sustainable Business Summit Sept.

29-Oct. 1 in Washington, D.C. Among the presentations and discussions will be a session called “Getting Serious about Climate Change — Putting a Price on Carbon.”

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While that’s a somewhat different issue from the Clean Power Plan, this discussion — featuring political leaders from both sides of the aisle, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and former Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC) — is a chance to begin a new dialogue and find business-friendly solutions to climate change that all stakeholders can agree on.

Ideally, discussions about transitioning from fossil fuel should include all stakeholders —and certainly all types of business. By following an approach that is balanced, pragmatic and non-ideological, business people can contribute a much-needed reset to a conversation that has become too polarized. Together, we must work to find a solution.

The alternative is unthinkable.

Making Treating, Recycling Fracking Water More Economical July 20, 2015 process to make hydraulic fracturing, or fracking water-neutral, by making treating and recycling contaminated oilfield water more economical, is under development by MIT spinout Gradiant Corporation.

MIT News reports that Gradiant says the cost-effective water treatment system will save millions of gallons of water — and millions of dollars — annually.

Launched in 2012 with help from MIT’s industry-connected ecosystem, Gradiant has erected two 12,000-barrel-per-day plants in the Permian Basin of Texas, partnering with two drilling clients who treat about 10,000 barrels daily there.

The plants each use separate technologies that treat varying infeed water, which can be adjusted to customer specifications. Carrier gas extraction (CGE), a humidification and dehumidification (HDH) technique developed by the Gradiant co-founders at MIT, heats produced water into vapor, and condenses it back into water, without contaminants. This yields freshwater and saturated brine, commonly used in drilling and completion processes.

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Selective chemical extraction (SCE) is a cost-effective version of standard chemical-precipitation techniques — where chemical reactions remove specific contaminants to produce clean brine. Both systems employ custom control algorithms that minimize operator intervention and chemical consumption, while continuously adjusting the process to account for varying feed water quality.

Thanks to several design innovations, these systems can treat water with higher levels of contamination using less energy and at lower costs than competing treatment methods, according to Gradiant.

Reverse osmosis, for example, treats water with a maximum contamination level of around 7 percent, while legacy thermal desalination reaches about 20 to 22 percent. But Gradiant’s technology uses even less energy to treat water beyond 25 percent, broadening the range of water that can be treated, the company says.

Source/ http://www.environmentalleader.com/

Aquatech Introduces Aquar2ro™ Process For Zero Liquid Discharge And High Recovery Plants SAN DIEGO, CA, USA, August 31, 2015 – Aquatech, a global leader in water treatment solutions, introduces the AquaR2RO™ membrane process designed for use in facilities requiring Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) or very high recovery.

The AquaR2RO process features a unique configuration of membranes engineered to cost-effectively treat waters that are difficult to treat with conventional membranes processes. Due to its distinctive design, AquaR2RO can tolerate feed characteristics that are high in organics, dissolved oil, and turbidity. The process can provide high recovery while handling high TDS water due to its ability to withstand higher than normal operating pressures.

The AquaR2RO process maximizes recovery across the membrane system and minimizes the volume of concentrate to be treated in the thermal-based ZLD with a brine concentrator and/or crystallizer. In 166

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most cases, it can replace the brine concentrator, thus optimizing the solution.

In some applications, AquaR2RO can achieve more than 98 percent recovery. “Integrating AquaR2RO in the ZLD process results in a reliable and robust ZLD plant that achieves very high recovery through a costeffective membrane pre-concentration step requiring a smaller thermal backend system. This results in significantly lower CAPEX and OPEX for the overall ZLD system. In a ZLD plant, thermal treatment generally contributes more than 50-70 percent of the total CAPEX and 50 percent of OPEX if waste heat is not available. While scaling and fouling in a membrane process can be mitigated through properly designed pretreatment, high TDS can be addressed only with membrane treatment. Conventional membrane systems are limited in recovery due to scaling and pressure considerations, but the unique configuration of AquaR2RO eliminates this constraint,� said C.K. Tiwari, Senior Vice President, Aquatech.

AquaR2RO is an ideal solution for industries such as oil and gas, power generation, steel, pulp and paper, and where the feed water has high scaling / fouling potential.

About Aquatech Aquatech is a global leader in water purification technology for industrial and infrastructure markets with a focus on desalination, water reuse, and zero liquid discharge. The company is headquartered in the United States, and has a significant presence worldwide through subsidiaries in India, Europe, the Middle East, and China. Aquatech strives to provide technology leadership and performance excellence to the global water industry, and aims to support its clients with cutting-edge sustainable solutions, minimizing their life cycle cost, as well as their carbon and water footprint.

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3M GHG Emissions Drop 64% 3M achieved a 64 percent absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions between 2002 and 2014, according to its 2015 Sustainability Report. The report highlights 3M’s progress toward achieving its 2015 sustainability goals and introduces the company’s 2025 goals.

3M’s GHG reductions from 2002 base through 2013 resulted in a cumulative reduction of nearly 100 million metric tons of GHG emissions to the atmosphere compared with the emission level during the base year. Among other methods, 3M achieves GHG emission reductions through increasing the use of more sustainable raw materials, improving process and equipment efficiency, upgrading equipment, reducing the company’s demand for energy use, increasing its use of renewable energy and implementing and maintaining pollution control technologies. 3M’s 2025 goal is to ensure GHG emissions stay at least 50 percent below its 2002 baseline.

3M sites are required to report water data quarterly into a corporate tracking system. Efforts to reduce its overall water footprint have been paying off. The company’s year over year water use decreased 1.6 percent, from 43.3 in 2013 to 42.6 in 2014. The company has decreased its water use by 13 percent since its 2005 baseline year.

The company recycled 25 percent of total water used in 2014.

To mitigate water risks where water is scarce or stressed, 3M’s corporate operating committee endorsed a water conservation goal as part of the company’s 2015 sustainability goals. Sites located in water-stresses areas are requested to develop a water conservation plan outlining current and future water conservation efforts. Annual stress-level screening evaluations are conducted for global operations using available updates from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) Global Water Tool.

3M increased on-site reuse and recycling by nearly 40 percent from 2010 to 2015. Its 2025 goal is to achieve zero waste to landfill status at more than 30 percent of manufacturing sites.

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Between 2005 and 2013 total energy use, indexed to net sales, has decreased by 30 percent. From 2000 through 2014, 3M reduced energy usage by over 50 percent indexed to net sales. Between 2015 and 2025, the company aims to improve energy efficiency indexed to net sales by 30 percent.

Coastal energy industry bracing for climate change, website reports The double threat of coastal erosion and rising sea levels is pushing the Louisiana energy industry to think of ways to improve coastal bases and other shoreline infrastructure beyond traditional storm hardening lessons learned after Hurricane Katrina, Environment & Energy reports.

The report says oil and gas industry hubs at Port Fourchon and in Venice are being forced to rethink what coastal ports -- a vital link to oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico -- will look like amid rapid shoreline loss.

Chevron has worked with Louisiana State University graduate students to envision operations that involve suspension bridges and shore bases able to relocate during a hurricane, the report says.

Farther inland, the report highlights Entergy Corp.'s efforts to build more durable power lines and sponsor local research on ways to spur corporate investment in coastal restoration projects through carbon offset credits.

Experts say corporations have the largest monetary interest -- and, likewise, the most money to invest -- in coastal restoration, which could help shape policy and projects.

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THE BANYAN TREE

Why performance appraisals fail: A root-cause analysis and alternative As an HR professional, I know the value of the performance appraisal. However, I also know that, if done poorly, they can have the opposite effect on an organization.

Performance appraisals have typically been driven by human resources. When performance appraisals are done poorly by management, it reflects on HR. Traditionally, management has sat their employees down one on one to go over the year in review, set the upcoming year’s goals and expectations. For years, the process has worked for few, but because of the time involved, it’s not done with any degree of success.

Why should we do performance appraisals?

The purpose of performance appraisals is to provide individual feedback relative to the organizational goals. They should measure an individual’s contributions in terms of quality, quantity, timeliness, and costliness.

Why have organizations and upper management lost interest in them? Why do experts and management agree the performance appraisal/performance management effort is broken and is a waste of time?

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HR departments drive performance appraisals, so they take the burden of their failure. There are many reasons why performance appraisals fail. Some appraisers have no idea what to measure. In other words, they can’t tie an individual’s performance to the company’s strategic plan or business plan. Many appraisers focus only on recent events rather than evaluating the entire year when reviewing the employee’s performance. Many appraisers fail to follow up periodically on the goals they have given their employee to achieve — missing opportunities to correct problems or review progress during the year.

Why don’t appraisers do a better job?

Most appraisers have too many employees to evaluate. More companies’ management structures are getting flatter, creating more work and more appraisals for each manager. Appraisers complain of the reviews taking too much time away from day-to-day management activities. Employees being appraised don’t always agree with their supervisor’s assessment, leading to unwanted friction and attrition.

Upper management recognizes when performance appraisals are done poorly because of inconsistencies, obvious favoritism, and dual standards by appraisers.

Corrective action Why not measure the department’s actual performance against the stated goals for the period being evaluated; and do away with individual appraisals? Where did the department’s performance stand against its goal? No individual performance appraisals, just organizational or department appraisals.

No more time agonizing over ratings; this takes all the subjectiveness out of the ratings picture. Each department’s rating is a reflection of their contribution to the organization’s bottom line. Each department’s employees, supervisors, and managers share the success or failure of their department’s performance. This allows for appraisal consistencies within a department that reflect that department’s performance.

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Performance appraisals are important because they are supposed to help defend an employer against accusations of discrimination or retaliation. Organizational appraisals would create more consistency in the peer relationship between appraisals and rewards. They would end the practice of favoritism and ratings unfairness, which is so often at the heart of workforce disengagement.

Upper management, in accordance with the organizational goals and strategic business objectives, would determine performance increases for each department. They would be based on a predetermined reward for “meeting,” “exceeding” or “failing” to achieve their department’s revenue or bottom-line goal. In other words, the appraisal process would be used to make business decisions for the organization’s future and the the employee.

Improving “team” dynamics and collaboration is another positive affect of organizational appraisals. The success of a department’s appraisal will have a direct result on all employees in that group. As in team sports, the sum of the parts are greater than any individual.

Coaching and training would have to be more prevalent to get the desired results.

Preventative action Instead of meeting with individuals to go over performance goals, the meeting is held with teams or departments, so everyone hears the same goals their department is expected to achieve. Concurrently, the same meeting can be used to go over the results at the end of the rating period to share the result of their work and how they will be rewarded. This would save management a lot of time previously spent on individual discussions and improve overall communication.

Increasing productivity of management is another effect of this approach, allowing more time to solving problems and training their subordinates, and less time preparing written evaluations, less time meeting, and less time complaining. This one meeting creates another opportunity to communicate the company’s mission and vision. It is an opportunity to outline the company’s strategic goals and explain how each employee’s contribution is an integral part in achieving those goals.

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Follow-up quarterly meetings to review department goals against actual results with the team, replaces individual meetings and improves department communications while saving management time and keeping employees engaged and accountable.

Eliminating the time-consuming appraisal process can improve communications and performance. It is a way to create a positive workplace environment. Developing trust, respect and loyalty are the secondary benefits of this approach.

Just because you always have done performance appraisals for each employee doesn’t mean you have to continue doing them. Bottom line: The organization’s actual performance will more accurately reflect employee performance.

When quiet is right: Why introverts make better leaders August 20, 2015, Economic Times in ET Commentary |

By Francesca Gino Conventional wisdom has it that extroverts make the best leaders.

While only 50% of the general population is extroverted, almost 96% of managers and executives display this trait.

The higher you go in the corporate hierarchy, the more the likeliness.

These people, outspoken and outgoing, are often favoured in times of hiring and promotions since they are perceived to be more effective by their supervisors and subordinates.

However, research suggests that in certain situations, people of quiet disposition make the better leaders.

To be sure, extroverted people have their strong points. However, they also tend to command the centre of attention and monopolise discussions. In a dynamic, unpredictable corporate environment, the quiet, silent type often make more effective bosses, particularly when their co-workers are proactive and eager to contribute ideas.

In a dynamic, unpredictable corporate environment, the quiet, silent type often make more effective bosses, particularly when their coworkers are proactive and eager to contribute ideas.

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By listening carefully to different — even opposing — viewpoints and being receptive to suggestions for improvement, they are able to lead energetic teams very effectively.

To test this idea, a field study was conducted among managers and employees at 130 franchises of a pizza delivery company in the US. Bosses were asked to rate how extroverted they considered themselves and employees were asked to estimate how often they demonstrated proactive behaviour.

Next, data was collected on each store’s profitability, accounting for variables such as the volume of business and the neighbourhood.

Results showed that in stores where employees weren’t very proactive, extroverted leadership was associated with 16% higher profits than average.

However, in franchises where workers offered ideas, extroverted leadership was associated with 14% lower profits.

In another experiment, 163 college students were made to work in groups to see how many T-shirts they could fold in 10 minutes. Each group had a leader and four followers. To manipulate the behaviour of the leaders, before the activity began: some students read a statement extolling extroverted leaders like John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Others read a statement praising reserved leaders like Mohandas Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln.

Even in this experiment, the groups with proactive followers performed better under an introverted leader, folding, on average, 28% more T-shirts. The extroverted leaders appeared largely unreceptive to the suggestions of their team-mates.

Furthermore, some followers were predisposed toward proactive behaviour. For instance, some of the researcher-followers stopped their groups after 90 seconds and suggested a better way to do the task.

The extroverted leaders appeared threatened by proactive employees.

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The introverted leaders listened carefully and made employees feel valued, motivating them to work hard.

To succeed as leaders, introverts may have to overcome a strong cultural bias. In a 2006 survey, 65% of senior corporate executives viewed introversion as a barrier to leadership. Other studies have shown that highly extroverted US presidents are perceived as more effective.

While it’s often true that extroverts make the best bosses and proactive employees make the best workers, combining the two can be a recipe for failure. Soft-spoken leaders may get the most out of proactive employees. So save the outgoing, talkative managers for teams that function best when they’re told what to do.

(The writer is a professor, Harvard Business School)

How Amazon's leadership principles corrupted its culture Amazon's well-documented culture shows how apparently laudable leadership principles can backfire, writes Alaina Love.

The company's love of candor led to a shortfall in compassion, while a belief that employees should always speak their minds led to backstabbing and malicious criticism.

"What [change] will require is that Amazon obsesses as much about its culture as it does about its customers," Love writes In Fast Company(8/24) A scathing article about Amazon was recently published in The New York Times describing disturbing allegations about the retailer’s abusive work environment.

Lending significant credibility to the serious questions raised about the company’s culture were corroborating interviews from many of the more than 100 current or previous Amazon employees who agreed to speak on record.

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Stories of unfair practices abound, including unjust co-worker complaints sent directly to a colleague’s boss and the individual who was chastised for not being able to work nights and weekends because she was caring for her dying father. The $250 billion retailer is eclipsing its competition, for sure, but it may be compromising its own leadership principles while doing so.

Despite Amazon’s reputation for hiring exceptional people, its current operating environment may result in it being a net exporter of talent to rival organizations.

Employees resign because they eschew the Amazon work culture, and others are culled in periodic Organization Level Reviews, where force-ranked employees at the bottom of the list are let go. The level of attrition at Amazon is among the highest in the Fortune 500, with median tenure at the company at just one year.

While Amazon will rebut these statistics by saying turnover is in line with the industry, the noise in the system suggests that something else is at play here, especially when company policy requires that employees refund portions of sign-on bonuses or relocation expenses if they resign early Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and among the world’s wealthiest people, has a reputation for demanding excellence and innovation, and promotes a meritocracy where the best ideas and the best people win. He also operates with an analytical, data-driven and confrontational mindset that is not for the faint-hearted, which is in part what has made his business ventures so successful.

Amazonians know, through a series of Leadership Principles defined by Bezos and his team, that customer obsession is a job prerequisite, and invention and simplification are the nutrients 176

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that feed the entire organization. But what happens when leaders take these principles to an extreme? What kind of culture is created when the principles cause the meritocracy Bezos desires to turn into a playground for muckraking? Of the 14 Leadership Principles that Amazon holds dear, at least four of them are at the core what could become the company’s Achilles heel. Let’s take a look: 1. The leadership behaviors described by some former employees dishonors Principle 11, which is to “Earn Trust.”

To do so, the principle states that leaders should “listen attentively, speak candidly and treat others respectfully.”

It’s hard to believe that the leader who placed a woman on a performance improvement plan once she returned to work after giving birth to a stillborn child was demonstrating respect, let alone compassion, anymore than the leader who did the same with a woman recovering from breast cancer because her personal difficulties interfered with fulfilling her work goals.

These employees were on notice that being fired was a real possibility. Whether they deserved to be told their jobs were in jeopardy, the optics couldn’t be worse with the rest of the organization.

The code message to co-workers is, “Don’t get sick and by all means don’t let anyone know if you do. Keep working at your usual pace at all costs because you are dispensable.”

It establishes a culture of fear, not a culture of creativity.

2. Another principle, “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit,” obligates Amazonians to “respectfully challenge decisions” with which they disagree.

But the company’s focus on giving criticism has been implemented such an extreme by some leaders, that employees are afraid to speak up; they’ve witnessed co-workers who did so chided to the point of tears, grown men included.

In a culture where employees are reluctant to speak up, the organization is likely to make decisions without full information, decisions it is likely to regret.

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The recent leadership debacle at Toshiba is a prime example.

3. “Dive Deep,” principle No. 12, demands that leaders work at all levels with a detail orientation that includes frequent auditing, and a bias towards questioning when the numbers and anecdotal evidence aren’t aligned.

It’s a principle that encourages a focus on metrics and embraces the Amazon manifesto for perfection, but it risks leaders ignoring the motivation and meaning required for employees to thrive, especially when combined with other principles.

Because the company collects data that allows leaders to know just about everything associated with staff performance, the push is always to beat the numbers: # fill more orders than you did last week; deliver the product to the customer sooner; # launch new products to market way before anyone thought is was possible to do so.

These are worthy goals for any organization striving to dominate the market and are best accomplished a nimble and entrepreneurial workforce.

However, the “Deep Dive” principle taken to an extreme is a particular threat when combined with principle No. 9, “Frugality.”

4. “Frugality” charges leaders to “accomplish more with less” since “there are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense” and “constraints breed resourcefulness.”

It may prompt leaders to overlook employee exhaustion and burnout, to bully employees into delivering more to the company while sacrificing family and personal lives, and to ignore the reality of a workload that far exceeds what is reasonably possible for the existing staff to accomplish.

This, coupled with a forced ranking system in an environment where employees can give unjust feedback to a colleague’s boss, creates an almost “Game of Thrones” environment, where those interviewed describe behind-the-scenes plotting and scheming to throw coworkers ‘under the bus.’

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It’s no wonder that individuals with sufficient ego strength naturally select out of such an environment. They possess boundaries that limit the degree of corporate servitude in which they’ll engage and a sufficient level of internally derived self-worth. But, when they leave, they take along with them all of the organizational wisdom and history they’ve acquired — and the competitor that hires them benefits.

What Amazon employees describe is the antithesis of the steps a leader would take to encourage flourishing and thriving in the workforce.

The company can do a better job of fostering a healthy work culture that still delivers results by creating an environment of harmony and respect while maintaining the energetic edge required for creativity.

Accomplishing this goes beyond drafting new Leadership Principles and entails much more than Jeff Bezos sending a message to employees inviting them to let him know directly when leaders are behaving poorly. What it will require is that Amazon obsesses as much about its culture as it does about its customers.

Author, Alaina Love is chief operating officer and president of Purpose Linked Consulting and co-author of “The Purpose Linked Organization: How Passionate Leaders Inspire Winning Teams and Great Results” (McGraw-Hill).

She is a recovering HR executive, a global speaker and leadership expert, and passionate about everything having to do with, well, passion.

Her passion archetypes are Builder, Transformer and Healer. You can learn more about your own passion archetypes here. When she’s not working with her Fortune 500 client base, Love is busy writing her next book, “Passionality,” which explores the alignment of personality, purpose and passion, and how it contributes to our well being. Follow Love on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or her blog.

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Simplicity is the antidote to complexity When dealing with complexity, stick to the goal while allowing for flexibility and adaptability, writes Valeria Maltoni. "Rather than counter complexity with complexity of our own making, we should seek to sharpen the quality of our thinking and our decision-making ability," Maltoni writes. Conversation Agent (8/24) “Chains of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

[Warren Buffet] As our world has become more complex, so have our attempts to manage it by trying to predict ahead of time every possible scenario.

Little by little, we have gotten into the habit of upping the ante on complexity with more complexity.

The habit is felt more strongly inside organizations where regulations and procedures can keep building on top of each other unchecked to unmanageable proportions. The tax code is a good example of this.

Instead of trying to cover all bases, say Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt in Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, we should use a small set of simple rules -- “shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information.”

The authors' definition of strategy thus is: Strategy, in our view, lives in the simple rules that guide an organization's most important activities.

Simple rules are those rules that are fundamental to achieving successful outcomes.

Why do simple rules work?

Because, they do three things well. They: • confer flexibility to pursue new opportunities while maintaining some consistency

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•

•

can produce better decisions -- when information is limited and time is short, simple rules make it fast and easy for people, organizations, and governments to make sound choices allow the members of a community to synchronize their activitieswith one another on the fly -- as a result, communities can do things that would be impossible for their individual members to achieve on their own

•

What are the common traits of simple rules?

1. they are limited to a handful -- to maintain the focus on what matters most and be memorable 2. they are tailored to the person or organization using them -for example, a nutrition program designed to lose weight is different from one used for athletic performance 3. they apply to a well-defined activity or decision -- trying to cover all bases injects vagueness and dilutes their impact 4. they provide clear guidance while conferring the latitude to exercise discretion -- so that we can exercise judgement To sum it up, simple rules: Refers to a handful of guidelines tailored to the user and task at hand, which balance concrete guidance with the freedom to exercise judgement.

If simple rules help solve complex problems, why aren't they more common?

First among the reasons is that simplicity requires time and effort to achieve. As Blaise Pascal wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

The first obstacle is the effort required to develop simple rules.

Like most worthwhile endeavors, it takes time and energy to get them right. The process of developing simple rules requires ruthless prioritization -- honing in on the essential and decluttering the peripheral.

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When explaining how he led Apple's resurgence from near bankruptcy, Steve Jobs emphasized the power of simplicity. “You have to work hard to get your thinking clear to make it simple,” Jobs said. “But it is worth it in the end because once you get there you can move mountains.”

The third obstacle to simplicity is what we call the “myth of requisite complexity,” the mistaken belief that complex problems demand complicated solutions.

We rarely challenge that assumption because we forego expanding our options. One of those options is trust in human nature.

Many organizations, for example, create and maintain detailed human resources policies that create “this is the way we do things here” type environments. Often, they go unchallenged for years.

After studying their human resources policies, executives at Netflix determined that 97 percent of their employees where trustworthy.

Nearly all of the company's time writing, monitoring, and enforcing detailed personnel policies was directed at the remaining 3 percent.

Rather than continue to produce binders of detailed regulations, Netflix executives concentrated on not hiring people who would cause problems, and removing them quickly when hiring mistakes were made. This change allowed the company to replace thick manuals with simple rules.

The company's policy for expenses, travel, gifts, and conducting personal business at work, for example, was reduced to four rules: (1) expense what you would not otherwise spend, (2) travel as if it were your own money, (3) disclose nontrivial gifts from vendors, and (4) do personal stuff at work when it is inefficient not to.

Rather than counter complexity with complexity of our own making, we should seek to sharpen the quality of our thinking and our decision-making ability.

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The process to craft simple rules starts with understanding what moves the needles and identifying the bottleneck. Testing and refining through use help improve the rules by adapting them to new conditions.

How Much Would You Sacrifice to Start Your Own Business?

May 7, 2015 In Silicon Valley (where I live) it can feel like anyone with an idea these days is starting a company. But building a business requires far more than an idea. It requires blood, sweat, and tears to the point of obsession.

There is in fact nothing easy about being an entrepreneur.

Leaving Salesforce.com five years ago to found Hearsay Social was one of the hardest but best decisions I’ve ever made. It took every ounce of courage and conviction to make the leap from a comfortable job at a big company to a completely blank slate. And I have never looked back.

For those of you ready to take the plunge, I assure you there are few things in life as rewarding. Here are a few of the most important lessons I have picked up along the way: Be ready for sacrifice ------------------------When startups succeed, they do so against all odds. In the beginning, you have nothing except for your own talents and resources.

By definition, everyone else is bigger, further along, and more established than you. To win, you have to swim upstream early on– and that requires hard work and long hours. There are no shortcuts.

Our first year in particular was marked by long days and nights that often blurred together. We pulled all-nighters in my living room, and then when we got our first office, we would go home at three in the morning or often just spend the night.

There were no sick days or vacations. I regret missing my friends’ birthdays during this time. I stopped socializing altogether

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except with coworkers. I also had to get comfortable and adapt quickly to not having a salary for an indefinite amount of time.

The specific areas of sacrifice are different for each entrepreneur, but there is always sacrifice of one form or another. Success requires focus, and focus is about tradeoffs.

Choose your partners wisely --------------------------------The ability to evaluate, attract, and build strong working relationships with cofounder(s), early employees, and investors often means the difference between success and failure.

I was incredibly fortunate to co-found Hearsay Social with longtime friend and Stanford classmate, Steve Garrity. As first-time entrepreneurs, it helped tremendously to bounce ideas and talk through big decisions and differing perspectives with one another.

Our decade-long friendship provided a foundation of trust for us to debate as well as reassure one another through the inevitable emotional roller coaster that is part of every startup journey.

Your key early hires will help determine the fate of your business, too.

Hearsay’s first employee, has played multiple roles within the company and recently moved to London to start and head Hearsay Social Europe.

Another early employee, started as a customer success manager, later ran our customer success department, and a few months ago moved to Hong Kong to launch our Asia office.

The founding team and early employees establish the company culture. At Hearsay, we decided early on that we would value three things above all else: 1) long-term customer success, 2) teamwork and 3) getting stuff done.

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partners and employees persists throughout the life of a company, but it is especially important in the beginning.

Obsess over your customer -------------------------------Many companies talk about customer success, but how many actually put the customer first above all else, always?

One of Hearsay’s proudest moments happened earlier this year, when a customer of ours—the CEO of a Fortune 100company–spoke at our January kickoff event and said he views Hearsay as a partner, not a vendor.

At this company, the CEO and general managers–rather than the procurement department–own the relationship with Hearsay. It is a true partnership and crucial to our success. This level of trust was not easy to achieve, and is something we must re-earn every day.

In practice, enabling customer success has also evolved significantly since our founding days. Early on, customer success at Hearsay meant customers having my personal cell phone number. It meant pulling all-nighters to fix a bug in the code and other hero moves.

Today, we have a global customer support team with a 1-800 number (thankfully!) and quality assurance and site reliability teams.

From Nordstrom and Zappos to Apple and Zendesk, a focus on doing right by the customer and delighting her or him is what every successful company has in common.

Obsess over your customer or would-be customer from the very beginning, and the rest will work itself out.

This article was originally published in Fortune.

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F2F Innovation needed for long-term sustainability, says Prof.

Thomke of HBS N.S.VAGEESH, MUMBAI, AUG 20:

'Innovation is not just the R&D department's job ... it is for all employees and the CEO to pursue, if the business has to be sustainable in the longrun.'

Professor Stefan Thomke, William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, is an Indophile – he has been travelling to India regularly from his student days when he roughed it out on a backpack and an Indrail pass. Years later, as part of the Harvard Business School faculty, Prof Thomke returns frequently to teach at the HBS executive education programme at Mumbai.

His knowledge of the city’s geography, its lifelines, quirks and customs would make a local proud. That depth is explained partly by his professional interest in the city — he authored a popular case study on the Mumbai Dabbawallahs, the lunchbox delivery system unique to the city of Mumbai. In this interview, conducted recently when he was in Mumbai to teach a programme on innovation, Prof Thomke throws some light on some of his recent research work as well as on his famous Dabbawallah case.

He defines innovation as something that is novel and has value and urges companies to be innovative as part of a drive towards long-term sustainability. It is not just the R&D department’s job, he says. It is for everyone in the company and for the CEO to wake up to that reality, he adds. Edited excerpts:

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How did you get interested in the subject of innovation?

I am a trained electrical engineer, originally from Germany and then moved to US, did a PHD in electrical engineering, worked with Mckinsey & Co. and then joined the HBS twenty years ago. Given my engineering background, it is not surprising that I was interested in product development, R &D management, manufacturing productivity, improving factory output, and so on. When you are in a place like HBS and interact with leaders, you tend to get broader in your scope of work. It was a kind of natural evolution.

For a growth market like India, what is the incentive for companies to innovate? When is the best time for them?

My answer is all the time. Of course, when the market is growing, and core businesses are doing well, they are distracted and there is no time. When times are bad, when things slow down, companies feel they have no money for it, that they have to save capital.

One of the companies that I worked with addressed this issue during the global crisis in 2008-09. When everybody else applied the brakes, the CEO of this firm increased spending (even though the board was opposed to it) and put money into projects and product development.

When the business revived and customers started placing orders, he was the only game in town – and was able to jump ahead of the competition.

When you take that path, isn’t it a gamble with the result being uncertain?

Innovation is not something you switch on and hope it will happen next week. It may take years. So you have to do it all the time. And you must do it when the end result is not clear. If you are always looking for assurance, then maybe you are not ready to be CEO. When you look at it closely, it is not that risky. Think about what you are going to leave for your successor. I deal with these issues in a case study on Lego, the famous plastic toy builder company. This is something I divide into four periods — the first, where the founders built one of the greatest brands. In the second phase, they look around, see other great brands such as Disney/Coke and feel that 187

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they are too small relative to the significance of their brand. So, they engage in what is called brand stretching and get into all kinds of businesses — watches, amusement parks, etc. It doesn’t work. In phase three, they bring in a turnaround specialist to save the company. He does a lot of things by the book — and ends up bringing the company to the edge of bankruptcy. So in the fourth phase, a new CEO is appointed, 35 years old, does one of the most amazing transformations in the last decade and turns it into the number one in terms of revenue and profitability.

What did he do?

Many things. He cut the complexity that had accumulated in product development under the earlier CEO. He managed innovation in an interesting way. There were two groups – one for breakthrough innovation and one for incremental innovation. If you give both to one group, they struggle. So the incremental innovation group was told that most of what they do will go to market and they were not to take too many risks and just extend the product line. The other group was told that most of what they brought out would not go to market.

Responsibilities and resources were assigned accordingly. Then he went out and courted retailers. This wasn’t being done earlier, because they were not considered important. But the retail game had changed and the company had to keep them happy. That is the short version of the story.

Tell us about your case on Mumbai Dabbawallahs.

People may think it is a logistics case. I didn’t position it like that. It is a case about getting the most out of people. Almost any manager has this issue - This year, you have met your goals, but your boss will tell you that next year he wants more. The bar is set higher and higher.

You are always expected to produce exceptional results. Now, the problem is you have to do it with the same people. You can’t always go and hire stars and replace people. You don’t have that option. You have to get more performance out of the same people. We are all ordinary, so how do you heighten it. Then I introduce Dabbawallahs.

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resources, diversity or other accomplishments, we would agree they are less than ordinary. But what they do is extraordinary. The answer to how they do it is that you need a system. You just can’t hope and pray. You need an approach and a system. This is an example of an organisation that has done it. That’s what the case is about and we unlock the secret.

(This article was published on August 20, 2015)

Assam field a 'new growth opportunity': HOEC Approval for the AAPON 94/1 gas field in Assam will boost revenues, P Elango, MD Hindustan Oil Exploration Company Limited (HOEC) told CNBC-TV18.

The company is the operator in this 130 bcf gas reserve and has partnered with Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and Oil India, he said.

“What we expect to achieve is a production profile of 20 million cubic feet of gas per day which is roughly equivalent to about USD 1,25,000 of gross revenue for the whole joint venture as a whole,” Elango said.

Below is the edited transcript of P Elango’s interview with Reema Tendulkar and Sumaira Abidi on CNBC-TV18.

Sumaira: First I want to talk to you about your topline. What is the reason that we are seeing this consistent fall or the degrowth in your topline?

A: We are dealing with offshore field where we had some issue, there has been a decline in gas production from this PY-1 field but what we have focused since we took over is to really look at a new growth opportunity by securing the field development plan approval for the Assam gas development, we have achieved that.

So, looking ahead now-to us this is a first milestone in terms of

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turning around the company. We have secured this approval, field which is in Assam with good access to the market side.

The gas that will be produced in this field will be sold and that will kick off a new stream of cash flow to the company and we see that as a positive sign where from now onwards the company could take small steps of growth.

Reema: Would this plant, the one which you are talking about this field in Assam be this AAPON 94/1 for which you got the approvals recently?

A: Yes. Reema: Can you tell us about this plant, what will be the kind of revenues as well as margins you can generate in FY16 and FY17?

A: This is a 130 bcf gas reserve. We are partners with Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and Oil India; we are the operator. What we expect to achieve is a production profile of 20 million cubic feet of gas per day which is roughly equivalent to about USD 1,25,000 of gross revenue for the whole joint venture as a whole.

Our net revenue would be, net of all cost, will be about USD 25,000 per day which is roughly about USD 10 million per year. I think the company continues to be a very low cost operator and this revenue stream will almost double the current revenue profile.

We achieved a total revenue of roughly Rs 48 crore this year. Once we commence the production and achieve the plateau, we would be doubling the revenue stream.

The most interesting thing is, this is expected to sustain at the pleateu level for 15 years. So, the company will come out of all the issues that it faced in the past with this new scheme of revenue.

Sumaira: What is the total number of blocks that you have and how many are operational?

A: We have got totally 10 blocks. Out of this we have got a very good mix offshore, onshore as such. Plus the mix includes couple of exploration blocks in Rajasthan and three-four producing blocks – three of them in Gujarat and one in PY-1 offshore.

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There is another producing block PY-3 which remained shut down and we are not the operator for that block. Then we have got another block in Andhra Pradesh which is more in the exploration side. So, basically we have got three exploration blocks and about five production blocks and couple are under development.

Where we are really focusing the company is to at this current price environment, it makes a lot of sense to focus on the onshore block.

Our focus is primarily on the onshore level and in that effort this is a very good beginning for the company.

Reema: Let me come back to that block in Assam. You said that it will help you double your revenues. How much time will that take?

A: We are looking at executing this project within about 18-24 months. The next milestone to be achieved for the project is securing the environmental approval which we expect to get by the last quarter of this year. In fact the public hearing date will be fixed by the district collector sometime in June-July.

Sumaira: For FY15 your depreciation is Rs 370 and if I compare it to a year ago it was Rs 103 crore. What is the reason that it is so high in this year?

A: Overall this year what we have done is, our approach was to basically clean up the balance sheet. Our promoter, ENI, has been very generous in writing off a Rs 960 crore loan that they had lend which was their external commercial borrowing that has been written off.

We looked at the current price environment, some of the offshore assets carried values have been written off. So the company today is a debt free company with a clean balance sheet and presents a good opportunity to creating new streams of revenue. The numbers that you see this year are reflection of this exceptional write off that has occurred.

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