Edinburgh, Scotland, has a new research center planning to open its doors in 2015. It is the Sir Charles Lyell Centre, named after Britain's 19th century geologist. The uptick of interest in emerging industries of shale oil and gas and deep sea metal mining is just one of the areas of the focus planned for the centre.
The popularity of Don Clarke's talk on induced seismicity took him by surprise. Then, he was asked to give it as an ethics talk leading to him serving as the Distinguished Ethics Lecturer this year.
Over the past two years large variations in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates of the volume of methane released during natural gas production have been used by organizations arguing respectively that natural gas is cleaner than or dirtier than coal.
Image control: Drones don’t always get good press – think spying, or even warfare. But drone technology, combined with precise photography, can make valuable contributions to the energy industry.
Stealth apparently can come in all sizes so some countries are hesitant to accept the use of UAVs for research. Fortunately Norway is one of those places that have permitted geoscientists to drone on.
Is that a UFO? Actually it is a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), which is an airborne drone that is proving to be useful both onshore and offshore.
Coming to a field near you – new technology that will reshape the oil and gas industry. When? Maybe sooner than you think.
One of the more consistent topics in the news, no matter the media, is the environmental impact from any human source or activity. We all know this well! Too often as geologists we assume that everyone knows as much about the earth as we do, but the fact is that the vast preponderance of people do not (this is an obvious understatement!). Therefore, we must all be teachers, advisers, mentors and examples of good environmental practice and distributors of geoscience knowledge.
As shale gas development has boomed over the past decade and public concern about its safety has swelled, both regulatory agencies and operating companies have accelerated their efforts to improve environmental safety.
A valuable study funded by the Texas Water Development Board sets aside the controversy and takes a closer look at hydraulic fracturing and water resources and consumption.
Perhaps you did a double take pulling the April issue of EXPLORER from the mailbox. What is this? If you joined AAPG in the last 40 years, you’ve only known EXPLORER in its long-standing tabloid format. It worked well for many years as our advertisers – particularly seismic companies – loved the large format and the ability to display their data on a sweeping canvas. For readers, it was a little more awkward.
The Paris Basin offers times of both discoveries and failures, from its first well drilled near Normandy in the 1920s to today.
Carbon capture and sequestration reduces emissions, but it cannot work past cost barriers without the revenue opportunities provided by utilization and storage.
Nihal Darraj, carbon capture and storage researcher at Imperial College, London shares barriers to CCUS commercialization, including costs, technology, permitting and more.