Exploitation Of Oil Resources Research Articles

State-of-the-art power factor correction in EV charger

With the vigorous development of the automobile industry, the exploitation of oil resources has gradually deepened, which has led to the gradual depletion of oil resources. In this situation, electricity has come to replace oil resources in the automobile industry. However, in the charging process of electric vehicles, the use of the efficiency of electric energy is particularly important. If the efficiency is low, then a lot of power is lost in the power transmission line or alternating magnetic field conversion. And an important factor affecting efficiency is the power factor. The traditional AC-DC converter with a full bridge has low power utilization and efficiency, existing studies combine full-wave bridge with other circuits with different functions to form power factor correction (PFC) topologies. And these fundamental topologies continue to develop, derived from the bridgeless, interleaved PFC topologies, etc. This paper reviews the fundamental full-wave bridge PFC topologies and some derived bridgeless PFC topologies and interleaved parallel PFC topologies, including showing their circuit diagrams, explaining the operation principle of these circuits and comparing the advantages and disadvantages of each PFC topology.

Effect of Oil Pollution on Permeability of the Grey Desert Soil under Freeze-thaw Cycles in Arid Areas of Western China

ABSTRACT There are abundant oil resources in Xinjiang, and the exploitation of oil resources could easily pollute the soil. In this paper, the impact of oil pollution on permeability of the gray desert soil affected by freeze-thaw cycles under a dry and cold climate of Karamay region in Xinjiang was studied. First, varying-head infiltration tests were conducted on soil samples with different water contents and pollution intensity without exposing to freeze-thaw cycles. The variability of permeability were analyzed employing the scanning results of the polluted soil samples by an electron microscope. Then several freezing and thawing cycle tests were implemented on the samples. The test results shown that the soil permeability was optiomal and the permeability coefficient was highest when the crude oil pollution intensity was 0.61% and the water content was 15.53%. With the water content in soil samples being the same, the soil permeability coefficient increased in the beginning and then decreased as the pollution intensity increased. When the pollution intensity ranging from 0.5% to 1.75%, the freezing and thawing condition could be the leading factor affecting the soil permeability. However, when the oil content was within the range of 1.81% – 2.41%, the freezing and thawing condition could not be the leading factor affecting the soil permeability. The results provided in this study could serve as a relevant basis for the remediation of soil pollution in oil production plants in arid areas of Western China.

Bacterial and archaeal diversity in oil fields and reservoirs and their potential role in hydrocarbon recovery and bioprospecting.

Hydrocarbon is a primary source of energy in the current urbanized society. Considering the increasing demand, worldwide oil productions are declining due to maturity of oil fields and because of difficulty in discovering new oil fields to substitute the exploited ones. To meet current and future energy demands, further exploitation of oil resources is highly required. Microorganisms inhabiting in these areas exhibit highly diverse catabolic activities to degrade, transform, or accumulate various hydrocarbons. Enrichment of hydrocarbon-utilizing bacteria in oil basin is caused by continuous long duration and low molecular weight hydrocarbon microseepage which plays a very important role as an indicator for petroleum prospecting. The important microbial metabolic processes in most of the oil reservoir are sulfate reduction, fermentation, acetogenesis, methanogenesis, NO3- reduction, and Fe (III) and Mn (IV) reduction. The microorganisms residing in these sites have critical control on petroleum composition, recovery, and production methods. Physical characteristics of heavy oil are altered by microbial biotransformation and biosurfactant production. Considering oil to be one of the most vital energy resources, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of petroleum microbiology. This manuscript reviews the recent research work referring to the diversity of bacteria in oil field and reservoir sites and their applications for enhancing oil transformation in the target reservoir and geomicrobial prospecting scope for petroleum exploration.

Conflict dynamics in post-2011 Libya: a political economy perspective

After the fall of the Qadhafi regime Libya has become a theatre of conflict and violence. In the midst of the vacuum left by the sudden collapse of the old regime, various groups have come to contest their role in a new Libya. Illicit trafficking and the exploitation of oil resources have contributed to this struggle by empowering certain actors over others and by exhausting the capacity of the state. This article investigates the derailing of the Libyan transition and the opening of a new phase of conflict from a political economy perspective. It engages with key arguments developed in the literature on the economic causes of war and shows that the conflict in Libya challenges some of their conclusions. The establishment of areas of de facto sovereignty—warlordism—suggests two key factors explaining the discrepancy between theoretical arguments and empirical evidence: the problematic and contested definition of state and non-state actors in Libya; and an emerging political economy which is best described as an overproduction of governance rather than a lack of it.

English

Feminist environmentalist debate explores possible linkages between women and environmental issues such as inequality. One of the most pressing global problem at the centre of this debate is climate change vulnerability. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) creates global policy awareness on the realities of climate change vulnerability, women in the poor coastal regions of the periphery societies such as the Niger Delta, Nigeria, prone to environmental degradation seem to be missing out. This subject matter has been of immense policy concern. The increase in recent decades of environmental disasters, deleterious effects of oil resource exploitation by the Multinational Corporations (MNCs), pollution, gas flaring, acid rain, sea level rise, ozone layer depletion, global warming and related pressures, provide the need to explore feminist environmental challenges. As all such problems manifest with divergent climate related implications, the most fundamental challenge they pose to women seem less talked about. Niger Delta women who are largely bread winners in most rural households are at risk as their subsistence relies heavily on the natural environment such as farming, fishing, petty trading, gathering of periwinkles, oysters, crayfish etc. To explore this dynamic, the study deployed a desk review of relevant secondary data to examine possible linkages between feminist environmentalism and climate change mitigation. Findings suggest that climate change, mitigation has been minimal. The paper made some policy recommendations. Key words: Environmental security, climate change, women, development, Niger Delta

Microbial Enhanced Heavy Oil Recovery by the Aid of Inhabitant Spore-Forming Bacteria: An Insight Review

Crude oil is the major source of energy worldwide being exploited as a source of economy, including Oman. As the price of crude oil increases and crude oil reserves collapse, exploitation of oil resources in mature reservoirs is essential for meeting future energy demands. As conventional recovery methods currently used have become less efficient for the needs, there is a continuous demand of developing a new technology which helps in the upgradation of heavy crude oil. Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) is an important tertiary oil recovery method which is cost-effective and eco-friendly technology to drive the residual oil trapped in the reservoirs. The potential of microorganisms to degrade heavy crude oil to reduce viscosity is considered to be very effective in MEOR. Earlier studies of MEOR (1950s) were based on three broad areas: injection, dispersion, and propagation of microorganisms in petroleum reservoirs; selective degradation of oil components to improve flow characteristics; and production of metabolites by microorganisms and their effects. Since thermophilic spore-forming bacteria can thrive in very extreme conditions in oil reservoirs, they are the most suitable organisms for the purpose. This paper contains the review of work done with thermophilic spore-forming bacteria by different researchers.

Improving performance of a neural network model by artificial ant colony optimization for predicting permeability of petroleum reservoir rocks

Over recent years, oil and gas exploration has been beloved due to extended needs for petroleum and energy sources. In this way, the capabilities of intelligent techniques are studied by researchers in different fields of petroleum industry and geosciences, whereas it seems that these techniques can improve the prediction accuracy of exploration and production of the hydrocarbon reservoir. The performance indices of the artificial models have proven to be better than the conventional linear and non-linear statistical models. Artificial intelligence models are extremely useful for reservoir characterization, which requires a high-accuracy prediction for a good exploitation of the oil and gas resources. The present paper introduces an optimized neural network (NN) for predicting permeability based on a relatively new swarm intelligent approach, named ant colony optimization. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a relatively new computational intelligent approach, which was initially inspired by the observation of ants. The number of neurons in hidden layer, weights and bias are optimized in the proposed NN using the ACO. The data of a gas reservoir in the South Pars Gas Field of Iran was used for analyzing the accuracy of optimized NN in a real case study. Finally, to clarify the advantages of the optimized NN, its outcomes were compared with the results of a simple NN model, in which the aforementioned parameters were determined through a try-and-error process. The MSEs of the optimized and simple NN were equal to 7.95 md and 12.84 md, respectively, which correspond to the correlation coefficient (R) of 0.94 and 0.866, respectively.

An Interview with Leila Aboulela

Leila Aboulela is an acclaimed Sudanese writer who currently resides in Abu Dhabi. Writing is her main career, and she also cares for her two young children. The daughter of a Sudanese man and an Egyptian woman, Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 but grew up in Khartoum.1 Egypt and Sudan were both colonized by Britain yet had very different experiences of colonial occupation, illustrated by the fact that Sudan was governed under joint British and Egyptian rule between 1899 and 1955. As Aboulela's writing is shaped by these experiences, it is useful to consider her work in its socio-historical context. Edward Said famously opens the main body of Orientalism (31–36) with a depiction of Egypt's colonization under the leadership of such politicians as Arthur James Balfour and Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer (known as Over-Baring). However, it is important to realize that, notwithstanding its long-standing cultural and physical domination by Britain, Egypt achieved its independence relatively early, in 1922, and had a period of defiant pan-Arabism under Nasser in the 1950s, before succumbing to its position as what is now often regarded as a client state of America under the quasi-dictatorship of President Mubarak (Meijer 1–11, McDermott 147). In contrast, one of the defining moments of Sudan's colonial history was the Battle of Omdurman (1898), in which a small Anglo-Egyptian force, led by Lord Kitchener, in just one day killed at least ten thousand dervish followers of the religious leader known as the Mahdi. This rout is described even by such imperialist apologists as Niall Ferguson as “the acme of imperial overkill” (267). Recent Sudanese history has been marked by ferocious civil wars between the powerful northern Arab Muslims, the subjugated southern African Christians, the Communists, and the sharia-endorsing religious parties (O’Ballance vii–viii). Now it is the genocide in the western region of Darfur, the discovery and exploitation of oil resources, and the designation of Sudan as a state assisting international terrorism that receive the most critical attention (O’Ballance 123, 205, Flint and De Waal 126–34, Collins 16). More recently, the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has drawn considerable attention for becoming the world's first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes in Darfur. However, Aboulela writes that she wishes to counter these “stereotypical images of famine and war” by depicting Sudan as “a valid place” in her writing (“Accuracy” 204). Finally, it should be noted that Egypt has had long cultural and migratory interaction with the Muslim Arab people of northern Sudan (Fabos 3–46); Aboulela, with her dual parentage, is more aware than most of this shared heritage.

International labour migration in the Arab Middle East.

International migration in the Arab region since the Second World War has been essentially a product of economic forces though exceptions to this assertion are significant. For example the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca the Haj now involves an international movement of over a million people and forced migrations following the Middle Eastern wars have included some important international redistributions of people. Nevertheless migration for employment in the Middle East involving over two million people is one of the most challenging issues springing from the modern economic order in the Middle East. The direction volume and pattern of international labour migration have been determined by the uneven distribution of oil wealth in the Middle East and the uses to which it has been put. The exploitation of oil resources and the investment of royalties in the development of the economies of the oil-rich states have led to wide disparities of economic development and per capita income between the Arab states. This essentially is the factor which has determined the fundamentals of international migration in the Middle East. (excerpt)