From Fire to Water

From Fire to Water From Fire to Water From Fire to WaterEven with the recent crash in prices, oil production from unconventional formations, such as shale or tight sandstone, has transformed the industry.Since 2008, when U.S. crude oil production was 1,830 mio barrels (lower than any year since 1947), the country has become the largest petroleum producer in the world, with production in the 12 months through October 2015 at an amazing 3,412 million barrels.The combination of horizontal triole and hydraulic fracturing gets the credit for fruchtwein of that increase.But the so-called fracking revolution has had a downside, which is not well known to the general public the increasing cost of water for oilfield operations. According to data from the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission and the Ground Water Protection Council, while the drilling of an average well requires about 250,000 gallons of fresh water, the hydraulic fracturing of a well is much more water-intensive, averaging about 2.5 million gallons water per well.Much of this hydraulic fracturing activity happens in regions with acute water shortages. Some 48 percent of U.S. wells are located in extreme water stress areas, where more than 80 percent available ground and surface water is already allocated for such uses as agriculture, power generation, and human consumption. Several oil-producing states expect added stress on limited water supplies from future population increase.The Eagle Ford formation in south Texas is considered ground zero for fracking-related water issues. There are thousands of wells in the Eagle Ford region, and they consume water at a rate about double the national average. Compounding the problem is that 98 percent of the wells there are in areas with at least medium water stress, and 28 percent are in extreme stress areas.It makes sense that there would be a scramble for water in south Texas, but surprisingly, water is also a bottleneck in the Bakken, despite its location i n the wet and cold climate of North Dakota.There, the challenges are attributed to a lack of access points, limited storage depots, and permitting restrictions. In oil and gas production regions as diverse as the Marcellus in Pennsylvania and the Monterey in California, water issues are a big concern.behauptung water challenges are starting to significantly affect the bottom lines of oil producers, particularly in the current low-price environment. Treatment and reuse of flowback and produced water is a promising option, but is associated with high water treatment costs. Freshwater supply for fracking has rapidly become a multitausend milliarden dollar business with several leading oilfield services companies getting in the game. Freshwater procurement can cost up to 3 cents per gallon in some areas. The real wallet drainer, however, is transportation which can cost as much as 12 cents per gallon. Total water costs can therefore reach as much as 15 cents per gallon, which works out to $6 per barrel of water or as much as $2 per barrel of oil produced.It isnt just the direct cost to oil producers. Trucks are the workhorse of water transportation and trucking distances can be huge. Trucks bring along the expected problems of traffic, road damage, noise, and accidents, which make for unhappy communities.While obtaining water is a headache for drillers, they also have at their disposal the means for providing their own water. A technology known as atmospheric water harvesting can wring moisture from humid air at a surprisingly rapid rate. And though the technology has a reputation for being energy-intensive, oil production sites often have on hand fuel that they cant useand indeed, simply burn (flare) off.By harnessing natural gas that is now often just flared off, oil producers could eliminate a large fraction of their water needs.WASTE AND OPPORTUNITYFlaring is a big problem in its own right. While oil spills and refinery explosions get widespread media coverage , flaring often manages to stay below the media radar, despite having severe negative consequences in terms of pollution and constituting an enormous waste of energy.custompagebreakThe extent of the problem can be seen from satellite images of the Earths night side flared gas creates bright gashes in sparsely settled areas from Northern Africa to North Dakota. About 140 billion cubic meters of natural gas was flared worldwide in 2012, which is the latest year for which figures are available. That is 4 percent of global production or 20 percent of gas consumption in the United States. By any yardstick this is an enormous waste of energy, and would be valued at over $50 billion at todays natural gas prices. Flaring also accounts for more than 1 percent of global carbon emissions.The U.S. has seen a rapid increase in the amount of gas being flared, and now the country is the fifth largest flarer in the world, behind Russia, Nigeria, Iran, and Iraq.Some 40 percent of the flaring in the U.S. occurs in North Dakota, where it is estimated that a third of the gas produced is flared, since the Bakken is primarily an oil play with gas having a marginal value. Certain Bakken producers flare more than three-quarters of the gas produced. In Texas, the second-place flaring state, development of the Eagle Ford Shale increased flaring by 400 percent from 2009 to 2012. Eagle Ford now accounts for 54 percent of the flaring in Texas despite having only 3 percent of the states wells.One reason that both the Bakken and the Eagle Ford fields produce so much wasted gas is the wide employment there of hydraulic fracturing. After fracturing and completing a new oil well, there is an initial burst of natural gas, like the gas that fizzes out when you pop a soda can. Most oil wells in these regions do not have the infrastructure in place to utilize or capture this gas, and flaring remains the only practical solution to dispose it off.Flared gas-powered vapor einsaugung cycle for atmosph eric water harvesting The water condenser draws moisture from the air a secondary liquid absorbs the evaporated refrigerant a gas-powered boiler heats the solution to release the refrigerant as high-pressure vapor.Other factors promote flaring as an option. Texas producers, for instance, do not pay royalties or taxes on flared gas, and there are no restrictions on flaring in North Dakota in the first year, when most of the flaring actually happens. Recent rules in North Dakota require producers to have gas capture plans for new fields, but it is doubtful that regulations alone will reduce flaring, since more than half of flaring in North Dakota is from wells already connected to gas-gathering infrastructure.Flaring is a big missed opportunity for producers. The biggest reason for producers to sell oil and burn gas is that gas has a much lower value than oil. But there are innovations that utilize flared gas to create value.WRINGING WATER FROM AIRFlared gas has been used for onsite e lectricity generation however, this requires sufficient onsite demand or access to the grid. Extraction of natural gas liquids (NGLs) from the gas stream is another option that is practiced in some places. Reinjection of gas to the reservoir provides another alternative to flaring, but increases the cost of the project. More recent efforts have studied the use of flared gas to treat the flowback water that follows fracking.While the emergence of such technologies is encouraging, the solutions involve expensive infrastructure which often reduces the economic advantage of flared gas utilization projects.Water, on the other hand, is a bottleneck to oil extraction and is increasingly more valuable than electricity or NGLs. And it turns out that there is a means to use flared gas to create water right at the production site.The solution is called atmospheric water harvesting, or AWH. The idea is to tap the enormous freshwater reservoir in humid air by condensing moisture on chilled surfa ces using a refrigeration cycle, similar to what happens in an air conditioner or a dehumidifier. This can be done even in places that receive very little rainfall.Much like a refrigerator, however, the AWH process is very energy-intensive. Indeed, the cost of energy has been the verstndigung im strafverfahren breaker for industrial-scale AWH. Over the last decade, for instance, several electric-powered AWH units have been developed that are capable of harvesting hundreds of gallons of water per day. But the cost of the harvested water is more than 20 cents per gallon, which makes such harvesters impractical for industrial scale operation.But electricity isnt the only way to power refrigeration cycles. In places where electricity is unreliable or prohibitively expensive, propane or kerosene-powered refrigerators are available. Similarly, a large-scale AWH system can be run using gas (or some other energy source, such as sunlight or wind).In a natural gas-powered vapor absorption ref rigerator, cooling is generated by evaporating a suitable refrigerant in a bundle of tubes called an evaporator. The evaporated refrigerant is then absorbed by a secondary liquid. The refrigerant-saturated solution is then heated in the vapor generator to release the refrigerant as high-pressure vapor. This vapor condenses in the air-cooled condenser, and the cycle continues.Natural gas from the wellhead that might otherwise be flared off can be fed to a boiler (after treatment in a gas conditioning module). The steam generated in the boiler can then be used to release the refrigerant in the vapor generator of the refrigeration cycle.custompagebreakVapor absorption-powered AWH has advantages over other refrigeration options, such as vapor compression and desiccant dehumidification. Calculations indicate that cooling via vapor absorption yields more water than competing technologies, because of the higher cooling capacity generated per unit of gas burnt. An important advantage is tha t, at the wellhead, the gas is essentially free.The amount of water that can be expected to be harvested depends on flaring rates and the ambient weather. The average flaring rate per well in the Eagle Ford is 9,600 cubic meters per day for the Bakken, it is 5,500 cubic meters per day. Employing that gas to run AWH units instead of simply flaring it could yield as much as 30,000 gallons of fresh water per day from a single well in the Eagle Ford. From the Bakken, that figure is 18,000 gallons. Such harvest rates are possible from the gas that gushes out of a newly fracked well. Gas production declines in the weeks and months after a new well comes online. The decline rates vary a lot and are not well reported, which makes it challenging to predict the water production over time. In all, about 2 billion and 4 billion gallons water (about 10 percent and 66 percent of total water consumption) can be harvested annually from all the gas flared in the Eagle Ford and Bakken respectively.Wh at can that water be used for? While many oilfield operations require water, the two most important ones are drilling and hydraulic fracturing. At more than 50 locations in the Bakken (which flare more than 34,000 cubic meters per day), the water required to drill a new well can be provided onsite using flared gas in just three days. The water required to frack a new well can be met in three weeks. Those numbers suggest that with proper planning, AWH can supply a significant fraction of the water required to develop additional wells at existing sites. All told, 22,000 wells can be drilled or 2,200 wells can be fracked from the water produced annually by using flared gas in North Dakota and Texas.THE FIRE TO FIGHT FLARINGThe benefits of onsite water harvesting go beyond reduced water costs. For each well that is fracked with AWH water, 450 truck roundtrips are eliminated. My research estimates that using harvested water can eliminate 7 million truck roundtrips annually in Texas and N orth Dakota. There are many other soft benefits in the form of goodwill generated in local rural communities due to reduced traffic, pollution, and accidents.Despite the strong case for flared gas-based AWH, there are still challenges to be overcome before this technology can be deployed. For instance, in order to make the technology economically viable, the AWH system has to be made compact to the point that it can be mounted on a semi-trailer. Portability is critical, since flaring is a temporary situation and the equipment needs to be relocated where it is needed.The systems that are the most cumbersome are the water condenser and the air-cooled heat exchanger, both of which are bulky configurations of metal tubes and plates. Researchers are working to increase the performance of the condensers by coating the condenser tubes with water-shedding superhydrophobic materials, which drain the condensed water and can increase the thermal performance by a factor of ten.Similarly, there are multiple RD efforts targeted at developing compact, lightweight air-cooled condensers. Notably, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy has a specific program on this effort. The good news is that large-scale refrigeration systems of the required tonnage are already available. Ongoing RD efforts across the nation will provide solutions that make this technology more viable than it is today.Looking beyond the United States, AWH can benefit oil producing regions such as the Middle East and portions of Africa which flare large volumes of gas, face perpetual water crises, and have year-round high humidity. The technology can also be positioned as an alternative to desalination in humid places with high flaring rates, but which lack brackish water sources that could be treated.In an era when natural gas prices have remained stubbornly low, employing this technology in parched countries could be a means to provide a new market for natural gas.Keep burning gas, but to create water sounds like a business-as-usual message to an industry that is traditionally slow to change. It remains to be seen if industry has the fire to fight flaring with water.Vaibhav Bahadur is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.Total water costs for a fracked well can reach 15 cents per gallon, which works out to as much as $2 per barrel of oil produced.

What to Do When You Dont Feel Ready for a Challenging Project

What to Do When You Dont Feel Ready for a Challenging ProjectWhat to Do When You Dont Feel Ready for a Challenging ProjectYour anfhrer is finally letting you take the lead on a new project. But instead of feeling excited, you feel- in a word- panicked These arent the nerves that accompany stepping out of your comfort zone, though you feel like you dont have the proper qualifications, and youre genuinely concerned about your ability to execute.Your first instinct may be to decline, perhaps suggesting a colleague who seems better suited or clarifying that, while this project doesnt seem like a fit, youd still like to be considered for new opportunities in the future.But before you tell your boss no, take the time to gather more information. Use the three questions below to determine if you are, in fact, the right person for the job.1. Why Me?Okay, clearly Im not suggesting you literally turn to your supervisor, and ask, Why me? But the very first thing you must find out is why you were chosen for the project. If it was arbitrary- la Were slammed right now, and everyone needs to take on something extra- then it wont seem like pushing back for you to suggest a different new task that more closely aligns with your abilities.However, its just as likely that your supervisor meant to assign you to this project (thats his or her job, after all). And knowing that specific reason can provide a roadmap for your successful involvement.For example, imagine youre tasked with leading a hiring process for a new team member, despite the fact that you have no experience in HR. While you may think you couldnt do as good a job as someone with a background in personnel, your boss may have chosen you specifically because he wants someone who can quiz the applicants on technical specs that you know better than anyone else.Finding out why were chosen will help you identify the skill set your supervisor expects you to employ on the project. Moreover, knowing the decision was intentiona l can give you the extra boost of confidence you need to take on something new.2. Am I Part of a Team?Still worried you dont have all of the tools necessary to execute? Well, maybe you dont need all of the expertise. Im not proposing that your involvement with a project depend on how heavily you can lean on your teammates. However, you need to know the people with whom youre working and what their strengths are, because it may be that your skills will complement each other and allow you to successfully tackle the project together.For example, Ive been a part of several website redesigns, despite the fact I cant code. At first glance, that seems hard to believe- isnt hypertext markup language a requisite to restructure a website? Not in my case- each time, the company already had someone who managed the website technically, but it needed someone to visualize a new look that would be more user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing. So, Ive submitted redesigns in Word outlines, PowerPoin t slides, and Photoshop JPEGs- any format that made sense to the team member in charge of implementation.I could have simply declined the project because of my lack of technical skills, but by looking for how my experience dovetailed with that of my teammate, we were able to do a great job on something that neither one of us would have been able to do alone. Remember, your ability (or lack thereof) in one area may have little to do with your capacity to advance the project as a whole.3.Whats the Timeline?Before you decide whether or not you can take on this tough new project, consider the timing. If you need to brush up on certain skills and learn others, it will make a sizable difference whether youll have time to attend a training or if youre supposed to be up and running before the end of the week. A task that is due yesterday wont allow for you to consult many resources beyond Google. On the other hand, if its a project that will be executed over the next quarter, or if its the first in a series of the new initiatives, you will have time to fill in the gaps.If this is the case, be honest with your boss about the expertise you feel you are missing, and come prepared with a game plan for how you can acquire it. Tell your supervisor that stage 1 of the project (as opposed to Before I start.. which indicates that youre not ready) is reviewing best practices, consulting with experts, or anything else that will help you attain the most successful outcome. When time allows, an approach that includes you acquiring new skills or expertise will be particularly appealing because it means that youll prepared to hit the ground running with similar tasks in future.It makes sense that you would want to avoid setting yourself up for failure. But that doesnt mean you should assume you arent qualified for new and challenging projects. Before you make a decision either way, gather enough information to see how you might contribute to a successful outcome. And then, remember Youre probably ready for more than you even realize. Photo of clouds and ladders courtesy of Shutterstock.

How Employee Referral Programs Work

How Employee Referral Programs WorkHow Employee Referral Programs WorkAre you job hunting and wondering what employee referral programs are, and if they can help you in your job search? Employee referral programs are formal programs employers have instituted to encourage employees to refer candidates for jobs at the company. Referral programs benefit both the employer and current employees. In some cases, a bonus can be earned if a referred candidate is hired. When youre searching for a new job, a referral from someone who already works at a company can get your resume a closer look, and may even get you an interview. So, while youre searching, look around to see if you have any contacts at the companies where youd like to apply. If you do, then maybe your contact can help you get a job referral and get a benefit from the company in return for his or her effort. Benefits for Employers A referral program is a way to help ensure the company is recruiting top talent for available po sitions. The assumption is that current employees are uniquely qualified to identify the best candidates since they know the organizations mission andcompany culture.Employees may have friends or colleagues they know to be talented and who would fit into that culture. Benefits for Job Applicants For job seekers, a referral is a way to get your application priority consideration. When companies receive many applications for every available position, a referral can help yours stand out from the crowd of candidates. Its always a good idea tocheck LinkedInto see who you might know who can refer you for a job. If youre a college graduate, alsocheck with the alumni or career office for a list of alumni who may be able to assist. How Employee Referral Programs Work Employers with effective programs promote the option regularly to employees and provide an easy mechanism, like a paper or online referral system, for staff to forward referrals. Providing employees with a summary of sel ling points for working with the organization and educating employees about effective ways they can reach out to prospects are important ingredients for viable programs. Employee referral programs which have some mechanism for employees at all levels to make referrals are often the most effective.Some organizations conduct some specific targeting towards employees believed to have contacts from prior employers who are competitors or who have a reputation for developing high impact talent. Employee Referral Incentives Programs often have financial incentives for employees who make viable referrals like prizes, time off, free travel, and cash rewards.Sometimes small rewards are provided for any referred candidate who ends up getting an interview. In other cases, rewards are contingent upon referred candidates being hired and remaining with the organization for a specified period of time. Heres information onemployee referral bonuses. Non-financial incentives such as formal recogni tion of employees who make referrals through corporate communications can also be effective. Recognition of contributing employees by supervisors can also be an incentive. Friend-of-the-Firm Referrals Programs Some employers have expanded their referral programs beyond employees only and have added mechanisms for non-employee friends of the firm to recommend candidates for vacancies. Companies set criteria for who qualifies as a friend. Common categories of friends include ex-employees who have left in good standing, suppliers, clients, consultants, college interns, family members of staff, high-quality candidates who have declined offers, and members of advisory boards or boards of directors. Most organizations establish guidelines for referrals. For example, most companies stipulate that recommendations should be supported by tangible evidence of an individuals past performance. Firms make it clear that they are looking for top performers. They may provide materials to educate employees on the best way to approach and screen potential referrals. Some firms will put incentives in place including cash or prizes if referred individuals are hired and stay with the organization for a specified period of time. Potential Benefits for Employers As with employee referral programs, a major potential benefit of a friends program is the opportunity for an employer to source high performing individuals who are not looking at job advertisementsor otherwise actively seeking new jobs. Also, by relying on friends rather than strictly employees, employers open themselves up to a much larger hiring pool. An additional benefit is that friends of the firm are not on the payroll, so the time spent looking for potential hires is free for the company (beyond any cash or prize incentives).