Mitchell Johnson, the 2017 Texas Student Research Showdown winner, explains the properties of measuring fluids in oil and gas wells.
How can oil and gas well drilling be improved? Can Bluetooth signals control elements of the user’s environment? How do endocrine-disrupting chemicals affect individuals and their offspring? (more…)
The mountain pine beetle has destroyed more than 40 million acres of forest in the western United States. That amounts to an area the size of Washington state that is strewn with conifers left for dead. (more…)
Vegetation at Most Abandoned Oil and Gas Pads Slow to Recover After 10 Years
A new scientific approach can now provide regional assessments of land recovery following oil and gas drilling activities, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. (more…)
Nearly five years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion led to the release of roughly 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are still working to answer the question: Where did all the oil go?
During the 2010 crisis, some of the oil gushing from the seafloor appeared as slicks on the sea surface, while roughly half of it, scientists estimate, remained trapped in deep ocean plumes of mixed oil and gas, one of which was more than a mile wide, hundreds of feet high and extended for miles southwest of the broken riser pipe at the damaged Macondo well. Many natural processes—like evaporation and biodegradation—and human actions—like the use of dispersants and flaring of gas at the surface—impacted the chemical makeup and fate of the oil, adding to the complexity of accounting for it. (more…)
The Arctic is home to a growing number of whales and ships, and to populations of sub-Arctic whales that are expanding their territory into newly ice-free Arctic waters. (more…)
Computer model can help with current, future clean-up efforts
St. Petersburg, Fla. – A newly developed computer model holds the promise of helping scientists track and predict where oil will go after a spill, sometimes years later. U.S. Geological Survey scientists developed the model as a way of tracking the movement of sand and oil found along the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The new tool can help guide clean-up efforts, and be used to aid the response to future oil spills. (more…)
New lab unifies data, expertise and novel analytics to speed discovery in industries including retail, medicine and finance
San Jose, Calif. – 10 Oct 2013: Scientists from IBM today announced the Accelerated Discovery Lab, a new collaborative environment specifically targeted at helping clients find unknown relationships from disparate data sets.
The workspace includes access to diverse data sources, unique research capabilities for analytics such as domain models, text analytics and natural language processing capabilities derived from Watson, a powerful hardware and software infrastructure, and broad domain expertise including biology, medicine, finance, weather modeling, mathematics, computer science and information technology. This combination reduces time to insight resulting in business impact – cost savings, revenue generation and scientific impact – ahead of the traditional pace of discovery. (more…)
Oil and gas development continues to press into the most remote corners of the western Amazon, one of the most biologically and culturally diverse zones on Earth. Now a study proposes a new 10-point, best-practice framework that combines technical engineering criteria with consideration of ecological and social concerns to reduce the negative impacts of Amazonian hydrocarbon exploration and production.
The researchers say, for example, that by using extended reach drilling (ERD), a technique to reach a larger subsurface area from one surface drilling location, it is possible to greatly reduce the total number of needed drilling platforms and access roads for a given project. (more…)
