̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - BP

Foreseer of future resources

lw355 — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 09:16:32 +0000

Understanding how energy can be used efficiently is key to reducing carbon emissions and mitigating future fuel and food shortages. But energy use is only part of the story. ̽��ֱ��link between resources and final services – such as food, warmth, shelter and transport – is only really complete if water and land use is also factored in.

Almost a year ago, nine experts from seven different departments across the ̽��ֱ�� set out to do precisely this. They reasoned that to understand the uncertainties ahead it is vitally important not only to integrate models of energy, water and land use but also to create a visualisation tool that could be widely used, by industry, policy-makers, researchers and others, to understand the consequences of how decisions today might play out in decades to come.

Foreseer

̽��ֱ��Foreseer Project is funded through BP’s Energy Sustainability Challenge, which is supporting projects in 12 leading research universities worldwide to explore some of the key issues that could shape future energy supply and demand.

At the heart of the Cambridge project is the use of the Sankey diagram – a remarkably intuitive visual interpretation of the quantity of resources and how they are consumed.

Although Sankey diagrams have been in use for over a century for mapping energy flow, they have had limitations, as Dr Julian Allwood, who leads the Foreseer Project, explained: “Past diagrams were based on economic data and stopped short of tracing the length of each energy chain from fuels all the way to consumers, halting instead at sectors. They gave you an idea of who to blame for energy use but they didn’t provide a basis for what you could change.”

By demonstrating two years ago that it was indeed possible to create a global snapshot of energy flow from fuel to final service, Dr Allwood and colleague Dr Jonathan Cullen realised that it might also be feasible to turn this into a tool with forecasting potential.

“We could then ask ‘what if’ questions such as what if car engines were to become twice as efficient?” Dr Allwood explained. “But to be truly predictive, mapping energy flow alone is not enough. An increase in biofuel, for instance, has implications for land and water use, as well as fertiliser use, which itself is an energy-demanding product. Energy, land and water are interlinked.”

Good decisions

̽��ֱ��key innovation of the Foreseer Project is integration. Access to the data, physical models and expertise were already in existence in departments across the ̽��ֱ��; Foreseer has brought them together for the first time. “It has been a fascinating experience for each of the Project members to expand from thinking about the variables that each of us are familiar with to thinking about how they couple with other resources on a massive scale. ̽��ֱ��Project has really got under everybody’s skin.”

̽��ֱ��team has had to start from first principles to understand how to build a map for land and water use. ̽��ֱ��first stage, recently completed, focused on California, USA, and Beijing, China, and the goal now is to expand this to other regions and then worldwide.

“Ultimately we want to be able to ask global questions such as: what are the resource implications of rapid economic development and urbanisation in developing countries, and the expansion of mega-cities? How will changes in climate, population and technology affect services such as food provision? Making good decisions now, including energy investment decisions, requires physically based predictions of future needs and pressures.”

For more information, please contact Dr Julian Allwood (jma42@eng.cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Engineering or visit www.lcmp.eng.cam.ac.uk/

An online tool will help users predict trade-offs between the global commodities of energy, water and land.

Making good decisions now, including energy investment decisions, requires physically based predictions of future needs and pressures.

Dr Julian Allwood

̽��ֱ��Forseer Project

̽��ֱ��Foreseer tool is based on Sankey diagrams, where the width of each line is proportional to the quantity of resource

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Yes

‘Elephant hunting’ with less risk

lw355 — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:30:21 +0000

Increasingly, companies such as BP are exploring for oil in very deep waters along the edges of the continents. Drilling beneath the seabed through rocks down to depths of 4 km and in water depths of nearly 3 km is both risky and costly. Scientists at the Bullard Laboratories in the Department of Earth Sciences are helping to reduce the uncertainty of finding oil in these hostile environments by developing an understanding of the structure and evolution of the Earth’s tectonic plates.

Dr Nicky White leads a project funded by BP that studies the prime focus of deep-sea oil exploration: submerged continental margins at the edges of ocean basins. It is in these regions that the thinning of the tectonic plate over many millions of years has generated rock layers and structures that have favoured oil formation and trapping. Over time, organic-rich rocks produce oil, which is expelled upwards, where it fills the pore spaces of a reservoir rock and is trapped in place by overlying impermeable rocks. For oil generation, it is crucial that the organic-rich rocks have been subjected to suitable temperatures for the right amount of time (thermal maturation) and it is here that Dr White’s group is providing invaluable new understanding.

̽��ֱ��laboratory’s track record of active involvement with BP reaches back to Professor Dan McKenzie, whose fundamental work on plate tectonics in the 1970s and 1980s helped BP undergo a major refocus on exploring sedimentary basins around the world. Within 10 years, BP’s search for giant oil fields in frontier areas – known in the industry as ‘elephant hunting’ – resulted in a string of exploration successes in places such as the Gulf of Mexico, Angola, Egypt, Russia and Azerbaijan.

Dr White’s work continues this pioneering geophysical research, generating sophisticated numerical models of sub-surface conditions. Working with BP has been key to the research, as Dr White explained: ‘A quantitative understanding of thermal maturation is only possible with access to terabytes of high-quality seismic data. BP acquires amazing sub-surface images that we then interpret and model.’

With billions of dollars at stake, reducing uncertainties in oil exploration will help BP to continue their century-long success in exploration and production, bringing new reserves on stream to compensate for depleting global inventories.

For more information, please contact Dr Nicky White (nwhite@esc.cam.ac.uk).

Cambridge scientists are helping to improve the chances of success of oil exploration in some of the Earth’s most hostile frontiers.

Ross Hartley

Acoustic image

Energy giant BP looks to its engagement with universities like Cambridge to help stay connected to cutting-edge research in science and technology.

‘As head of BP’s research and technology portfolio, my job is to ensure that BP has the technology it needs to contribute to the world’s future energy demands,’ said David Eyton, BP Group Head of Research & Technology and Executive Sponsor for Cambridge. ‘As part of this, we work closely with a handful of excellent academic centres like Cambridge to keep us plugged into the fast-changing world of science and technology.’

BP’s relationship with the ̽��ֱ��, which stretches back through the past century, was recently formalised by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). ‘ ̽��ֱ��MoU,’ David Eyton explained, ‘embraces all of our current interactions with Cambridge at a strategic level – from research activities, through policy development and training, to recruitment – as well as laying the groundwork for mutual support and development so that the relationship can fulfil its greatest potential.’ These interactions are being overseen by Andy Leonard in his role as BP’s Vice-President for Cambridge.

Valuing research

BP’s annual spend for 2009 across the ̽��ֱ�� is £3.6 million, of which approximately £1 million is funding technical research and the remainder is principally funding endowments and scholarships.

̽��ֱ��company’s main channels of engagement are the BP Institute for Multiphase Flow, established in 2000 with a £22 million endowment from BP, and Judge Business School through the Centre for India and Global Business and the Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies. BP has also had long and fruitful collaborations elsewhere in the ̽��ֱ��, especially with the Bullard Laboratories within the Department of Earth Sciences.

Several areas of applied research activities in Cambridge have brought world-class expertise to bear on practical issues that have reaped immediate benefits for BP, from exploration through to fuels and lubricants. But BP also views fundamental research as strategically important: ‘Although fundamental research can take years from invention to commercialisation, it also has the potential to yield something truly significant,’ said Eyton. ‘ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� has a fabulous track record of creating important knowledge and that is one of the reasons we are investing in Cambridge. As a business, we have to stay competitive and invest in areas that we believe will benefit our shareholders.’

Recruiting the best

Recruitment is very much part of the strategic relationship with Cambridge. ‘ ̽��ֱ��people we recruit today could have a profound impact on the company over many decades,’ explained Andy Leonard, ‘so we need to ensure that the highest quality students are exposed to the range of employment opportunities within BP.’ Also of importance, partly from a recruiting perspective, is the large number of scholarship programmes BP runs for research students, mainly in collaboration with the Cambridge Commonwealth and Overseas Trusts. This year, BP has made job offers to 20 graduates and 17 interns in Cambridge, as well as partially funding 49 research scholarships.

Recognising opportunities

‘ ̽��ֱ��key to success in strategic relationships is to create situations where there is genuine mutuality,’ said Eyton. ‘We want the relationship with Cambridge to achieve its greatest potential and to progress the strategic aims of the ̽��ֱ�� and BP.’ ̽��ֱ��company is also keen to support the strengthening of links between universities such as Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tsinghua ̽��ֱ�� in Beijing, predominantly with regard to finding new forms of low carbon energy and moving towards a more sustainable energy landscape in the world.

‘I am a big believer in investing in places like Cambridge that have a proven record of success,’ explained Eyton. ‘I also think that we have even more to discover in terms of opportunities for productive interactions. I’m delighted to say that we are on this journey.’

For more information about BP, please visit www.bp.com/

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Yes

BP Institute for Multiphase Flow

lw355 — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:10:59 +0000

Endowed by a £22 million donation from BP, the BP Institute for Multiphase Flow (BPI) was created in 2000 with the explicit intent of hosting research teams from five departments within the ̽��ֱ��: Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Earth Sciences and Engineering.

Today, a multidisciplinary team of almost 40 academics and students is working to understand how gases and fluids move. Multiphase flow is an area of great interest to BP as it underpins all parts of its business: from enhancing oil recovery to delivering it to customers, and from refining hydrocarbons to investing in a low carbon future.

For the BPI, engagement with BP enriches research in a very practical sense, as Professor Andy Woods, Director, explained: ‘Our close working relationship with BP gives us in-depth exposure to technical challenges in the industry as well as unparalleled access to field data that would be impossible for us to collect. This means that we can frame research directions that are fundamentally interesting to us as academics and can also solve problems that are of relevance to the industry.’

Currently, a large pan-Institute project is analysing the interactions between fluids and solids in oil fields to understand the physical chemistry that controls how much oil can be recovered as a function of the salinity of the water used to pump it from the well. Other projects vary from analysing the molecular basis of how lubricants work to understanding how volcanoes erupt, and from addressing questions about the long-term storage of CO₂ in redundant oil wells to determining how you can control heat transfer in buildings through natural convection. This latter research theme led in 2006 to the spin-out company E-Stack, which was set up to commercialise a low energy ventilation system that uses natural convection to keep the interior temperature of buildings buffered from exterior changes.

Professor Woods sees the link between basic research and industrial applications as key to research at BPI. ‘We determine our own research programme and our prime interest is in answering fundamental questions about flow. But we’re also looking at how this impacts on ‘real world’ applications because this in turn informs a whole new set of fundamental questions and, if we’re lucky, the development of unforeseen applications.’

For more information, please contact Professor Andy Woods (andy@bpi.cam.ac.uk) or visit www.bpi.cam.ac.uk/

Understanding flow – whether it’s of oil, air, lubricants, lava, seawater or CO2 – lies at the heart of Cambridge’s BP Institute.

Our prime interest is in answering fundamental questions about flow. But we’re also looking at how this impacts on ‘real world’ applications because this in turn informs a whole new set of fundamental questions and, if we’re lucky, the development of unforeseen applications.

Professor Andy Woods

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

BP Institute

Energy giant BP looks to its engagement with universities like Cambridge to help stay connected to cutting-edge research in science and technology.

Valuing research

Recruiting the best

Recognising opportunities

For more information about BP, please visit www.bp.com/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes