Shell benefits from energy crisis as soaring gas prices lift profits
Company says investors will benefit from continuation ‘at pace’ of $7bn share buyback scheme

Shell expects trading results at its integrated gas business in the fourth quarter to be ‘significantly higher’ year on year. 

Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Mark Sweney
Guardian Business
Fri 7 Jan 2022 

Shell expects a significant boost in profits in its natural gas division, thanks to soaring prices, when it reports its latest results next month, as the oil and gas company said investors would benefit from the continuation “at pace” of its $7bn share buyback scheme this year.

Shell, the world’s largest producer and trader of liquified natural gas, expects trading results at its integrated gas business in the fourth quarter to be “significantly higher” year on year as the rocketing price of gas outweighs a drop in production volume because of unplanned maintenance works.

Wholesale gas prices continue to break records, with energy suppliers warning of a “national crisis” that has already led to 27 suppliers going bust, and the prospect of bills increasing by more than 50% in April to about £2,000 a year.

Shell, which will report its fourth-quarter results on 3 February, said it intends to pick up the pace of its $7bn (£5.1bn) share buyback scheme, which is being funded using the proceeds of the $9.5bn sale of its US Permian Basin shale oil assets to ConocoPhillips at the start of December.

The company has already returned $1.5bn to investors and said on Friday the remaining $5.5bn “will be distributed in the form of share buybacks at pace”. The remaining $2.5bn from the sale is being used to strengthen Shell’s balance sheet.

While Shell is benefiting from the energy crisis, last week the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, held emergency meetings with the bosses of the UK’s biggest energy suppliers, who are pushing for the government to intervene to alleviate the impact of soaring prices.

Potential interventions being lobbied for include a windfall tax on major oil and gas companies such as Shell, as well as extending fuel grants, moving green levies from household bills into general taxation, and axing the 5% VAT on bills imposed when the UK was part of the EU.

Later this month, Shell will move its headquarters from the Netherlands to the UK and scrap its dual share structure, after shareholders voted to back a proposal to simplify the Anglo-Dutch company’s operation.

Shell pursues $7 billion buyback 'at pace' despite LNG troubles

LONDON (Reuters) -Royal Dutch Shell said it will pursue "at pace" a $7 billion share buyback largely funded from the sale of its U.S. shale business as it faces liquefied natural gas (LNG) outages and slower fuel sales due to the economic hit from Omicron.

Shares in Shell, the world's largest trader of LNG, were down 0.32% on Friday after a trading update ahead of its quarterly results on Feb. 3. This compared with a 0.12% rise in the broader European energy index.

Shell said that its production and liquefaction volumes were impacted in the fourth quarter by unplanned maintenance, mainly in Australia, where its giant Prelude floating LNG https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-halts-prelude-lng-production-loading-after-power-outage-2021-12-03 vessel was hit by a power outage.

LNG liquefaction volumes are expected to be between 7.7 and 8.3 million tonnes, well below a peak of 9.2 million tonnes in the fourth quarter of 2019, Shell said.

Shell's LNG trading results in the fourth quarter of 2021 are, however, set to be "significantly higher" compared to the third quarter.

Natural gas and electricity prices around the world have soared since the middle of last year on tight gas supplies and higher demand as economies rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Benchmark European gas prices and Asian LNG prices hit all-time highs in the fourth quarter.

Shell will later this month move its head office from The Hague to London, scrap its dual share structure and change its name to Shell Plc as part of a plan to simplify its structure and shift its tax residence from the Netherlands.

Last year Shell sold its Permian Basin shale oil assets to ConocoPhillips for $9.5 billion in cash, an exit from the largest U.S. oilfield as it shifted its focus to a clean energy transition. It said it would return $7 billion of the proceeds to shareholders on top of 20% to 30% of cashflow from operations.

"The remaining $5.5 billion of proceeds from the Permian divestment will be distributed in the form of share buybacks at pace," it said.

Shell, which operates more than 45,000 petrol stations, said that earnings from its marketing division were set to be lower than the third quarter "the demand impact due to the Omicron virus and foreign exchange impacts in Turkey."

(Reporting by Ron Bousso; Editing by Jason Neely and Alexander Smith)

Big Oil splits seem just a question of time
January 7, 2022
in Climate


There is virtue, as every journalist knows, in making predictions or proclamations that have a good chance of coming true at some point, even if they won’t right now. See the calls, at least in Europe, for big oil and gas companies to break themselves up.

The latest to add his voice to the cacophony for division is Lord Browne of Madingley, aka John Browne, the former chief executive of BP. The industry, he wrote in Time magazine, needs to be “bolder in separating low-and zero-carbon activity from their fossil fuels business”.

He joins activist Third Point that last year took aim at Royal Dutch Shell in arguing that big oil and gas companies are trying to achieve the impossible, by investing in high growth renewables businesses that should be well valued in the market while keeping the unloved hydrocarbons ticking over, declining but churning out cash.

Browne’s intervention is notable: he was the “architect of consolidation in the 1990s”, says Alastair Syme at Citi, an era when big names and big balance sheets were needed to secure the world’s most promising resources. The sector isn’t elephant hunting any more, notes Syme: renewables projects, even the biggest ones, are tiny in comparison. Focus may be becoming more important than scale.

Both Shell and BP try to make the case, with debatable success, that integration is intrinsically valuable in the energy transition: the ability to work with customers and to connect generation, with carbon capture or hydrogen infrastructure, and supply and charging. But it is fossil fuels’ role as a “cash machine”, as BP’s Bernand Looney put it, that seems to get greater traction as an argument.

One source of pressure on oil and gas majors has lifted: the cash balancing act between maintenance spending on legacy assets, green investment and returns to shareholders now looks feasible thanks to lower post-pandemic dividends and higher oil prices, notes Martijn Rats at Morgan Stanley.

But companies are using the cash thrown off by legacy assets to try to build out a “green” portfolio, one that is likely to be absorbing rather than producing cash for many years to come.

This is a “not now” answer to calls to split — one given extra credibility by uncertainty over what a standalone GreenCo at Shell or BP might actually look like. European peers such as Total or Equinor have more that could be carved out at present.

To be fair, it also isn’t obvious that the immediate valuation uplift supposedly on offer from a split will make it from the bankers’ anti-conglomerate pitchbook to the market. Syme reckons big oil and gas companies are valued in line with the returns they are offering.

Italy’s Eni, which is listing a stake in renewables business Plenitude, looks like a test case. But the spin-off has some retail assets included to bolster cash flows, so it isn’t for the purists. It also isn’t obviously planning markedly higher investment into renewables than had been promised in its old conglomerated home, so it’s not clear to what extent this accelerates the energy transition.

The more convincing case made by the splitters is that big oil and gas companies are fundamentally trying to bind together two competing constituencies in a way that is inefficient, won’t survive the duration of transition and won’t produce good performance in the meantime.

Companies could and should put more money into renewables and green infrastructure, especially as older fossil fuel assets are sold: a slow swivel from the old world to the new. But that’s something that yield-hungry oil investors, wary of the returns on offer from renewables and burnt by over-investment and poor returns in the past, won’t currently tolerate.

And it’s a strategy where the tipping point into official greenery looks far removed: BP’s ambitious plans to have 50 gigawatts of developed renewables capacity by 2030 caused investors to gulp but still leaves it as a majority oil and gas company in cash flow terms at that point.

No one wins the argument this year. But the oil and gas companies face a challenge. Make a far more robust case for integration. Or see another force join the allied ranks of investor activists, executive alumni and climate agitators who dislike the combination of fossil fuels and new energy assets: an absence of better ideas.

helen.thomas@ft.com
@helentbiz



Climate Capital
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The World Is Half-Prepared for a Different Energy Future


Humanity’s energy plans have two giant gaps.

By Robinson Meyer
THE ATLANTIC

Bing Guan / Bloomberg / Getty

JANUARY 5, 2022

Late January of last year, a group of economists, analysts, and financial journalists made an annual wager: How much would a barrel of crude oil cost when the market closed on December 31, 2021? Back then, the United States was only beginning to distribute vaccines, COVID-related hospitalizations were at an all-time high, and a futures contract for a barrel of Brent crude, one of the world’s two benchmark oil prices, cost about $55.

Most of the 29 guesses came in between $50 and $60. But last week, on the final day of the year, the price closed at $77.78. Lang Reynolds, a North Carolina–based electric-vehicle (EV) advocate who placed the highest bet of anyone ($85), won the cycle.

If 2021 taught climate hawks anything, it’s that they still need to care about the oil price—at least for another few months. Last year, as oil kept getting more expensive, the high price of gas began dragging down President Joe Biden’s approval rating right as he tried to pass robust pro-climate policy. (Gas prices were high only in an American context, of course—Europeans regularly pay more for their petrol—but in politics, all prices are relative.)

What’s stood out to me lately is that, because of a couple key mismatches in the energy system, this is only the beginning of such energy-related inflation.

The world has started to reduce its investment in producing fossil fuels. Right now, the world’s investment in oil and gas supply looks to be, somewhat shockingly, on track with a pathway of 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, according to the International Energy Agency. At the same time, the world is investing as much as ever in cars, power plants, and other products that use fossil fuels. That is, our investment in oil and gas demand still assumes a more-than-1.5-degree pathway. Consumers, companies, and countries seem to be assuming that oil and gas will be just as plentiful in the future as they are now.

The technical way to say this is that there is a mismatch between future oil supply expectations and future oil demand expectations. Let’s call this Mismatch No. 1.

The other mismatch is between clean energy and fossil fuels. Even as the world ramps down its investment in fossil-fuel supply, it isn’t investing enough in zero-carbon energy. According to the IEA, annual investment in clean-energy supply must triple for humanity to reach net zero by 2050. That’s Mismatch No. 2: The world is preparing for a net-zero world on the fossil-fuel side, but not on the clean-energy side.

Put together, these mismatches suggest that, if nothing changes, we can expect energy costs to go up. In the medium term, companies and consumers are going to want more oil and gas than the market can reasonably provide, and the price of both will increase.

Is that a problem?

From the standpoint of businesses, it is at the very least inconvenient. It suggests that the era of cheap energy that has persisted for the past decade is ending, and energy consumers can expect higher prices going forward even if the United States passes no further climate policy. For me, that suggests that passing policy is important, because the country should get off its current, more volatile energy system as quickly as possible. And from the standpoint of the climate-concerned, the price of fossil fuels really should go up, to reflect the damage carbon does to the atmosphere. The timing matters, though: Soaring energy prices can easily waylay the sort of pro-climate policy that could help make these mismatches better align.

That’s the big picture, at least. It’s important to understand. Now let’s complicate it.

Yes, fossil-fuel investment is falling now, BUT: It’s not mainly because of climate concerns. Global oil-and-gas investment fell by nearly a quarter last year because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C. And more broadly, fossil-fuel investment has been down since 2014, when the price of oil crashed. It hasn’t recovered since.

Yes, fossil-fuel investment is in line with a 1.5-degree world now, BUT: It’s about to go up. “Since we’ve had this lower supply for six or seven years now, we’re going to have to step it up,” Cahill told me. The rising oil price worldwide, the spike in energy prices in Europe, and the return of geopolitical anxiety will all induce drillers to invest more next year—and to drill more oil as well.

Yes, we need to invest more in EVs and clean energy, BUT: Even subbing in the same amount of clean energy wouldn’t solve the problem. The IEA has some pretty stark beliefs about how the world can limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It has published a list of behavioral changes that the world must hit in order to zero out carbon pollution by 2050. For the world to reach net zero, highway driving speeds must be capped to 100 kilometers an hour, or about 62 miles an hour, by 2030 around the world, it prescribes. Buildings cannot be cooled to less than about 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer nor warmed past 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. By 2050, neither business nor long-haul leisure air travel must happen at the rate that it’s happening right now.

In other words, the IEA doesn’t see the world reaching net zero by adopting EVs alone. Its “demand” forecast entails both technological and behavioral change—in the short term, millions of people must drive EVs and highway speeds must be reduced. So when the agency says that the world is not on a “demand trajectory” for getting to net zero, that’s part of what it means.

On some level, the scale of change that’s already under way is, in itself, somewhat shocking. It’s easy to miss in the IEA report, but the world’s investment in clean energy is already nearly three times larger than its investment in fossil fuels. That makes a certain amount of sense, of course: Countries can run their fossil-energy system on decades of foundational investment, while to spin up a net-zero energy system, they have to build from scratch. We are living in a world where those investments are happening—we’re already doing a lot to reach net zero. It’s just not nearly enough.

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet, and a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

Canada's Oil Sands Exports to Asia Reach Record With New Link

Author of the article:
Bloomberg News
Devika Krishna Kumar
Publishing date: Jan 07, 2022 

(Bloomberg) — Canada’s oil sands producers were able to export a record amount of crude to overseas markets thanks to a new link to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The recent reversal of Marathon Pipe Line Inc.’s Capline pipeline is sending oil sands crude produced in landlocked Alberta to export terminals on Gulf Coast where it can be shipped to other countries. Exports to Asia were at their highest ever, with India the leading destination by far, followed by China and then South Korea, according to oil analytics firm Kpler.

The development marks a sea change for Canada’s oil industry. The country holds the third highest crude reserves in the world, but exports to markets beyond the U.S. have been limited due to a lack of infrastructure. Canada has faced severe opposition from activists for building pipelines from the oil sands region to British Columbia’s Pacific Coast. Additionally, the Biden Administration last year blocked the Keystone XL pipeline, effectively shutting Canada’s crude out of the global market.

“Looking ahead, Canadian crude exports out of the U.S. Gulf should continue to show strength,” said Matt Smith, oil analyst at Kpler. “With Venezuelan crude exports having tanked in recent years, and now with the prospect of Mexican crude being taken off the market, Canadian crude appears to be one of the leading beneficiaries of these changing dynamics.”

Shipments of heavy crude jumped to more than 266,000 barrels a day in December after averaging over 180,000 through the year, according to Kpler. Canadian crude exports from the U.S. Gulf Coast averaged just 25,000 barrels a day in 2018, before rising to average around 70,000 in both 2019 and 2020.

In October, overall Canadian shipments of oil to the U.S. jumped to more than 4 million barrels a day, highest volume since the start of the year thanks in part to the startup of a long-delayed Canadian pipeline.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

There Was Way Too Much Lightning in the Arctic Last Year

More electric skies at the top of the world are yet another indicator of just how weird things are getting.

By
Brian Kahn
Wednesday 

5/01/2022


Photo: Mladen Antonov/AFP (Getty Images)

That the Arctic is a hot mess due to climate change is well-established at this point. But it’s always nice to have a reminder of just how out of whack things are getting, isn’t it?

A new report provides just such a reminder, showing that lightning is significantly increasing at the highest latitudes, a region more familiar with the Northern Lights than storms lighting up the skies. The trend was particularly acute in 2021, which saw 91% more lightning in the far northern Arctic than in the previous nine years combined.

The shocking findings come courtesy of Vaisala, a meteorology firm with the best lightning detection network on Earth, which released its annual lightning report earlier this week. The whole report is honestly fascinating because, well, it’s about lightning. But the Arctic findings are a sobering reminder of the radical changes happening in the region.

Lightning—or more specifically, the storms that can spawn it—requires warm, moist air and atmospheric instability. That’s usually in short supply in a region dominated by ice and snow. Or, more accurately, formerly dominated by ice and snow. Rising temperatures have helped usher in a new Arctic. Sea ice is disappearing, opening up the tap for more lightning-causing storms.

“Climate is changing faster in the Arctic than elsewhere on the planet,” Chris Vagasky, the lightning applications manager at Vaisala, said in an email. “Lightning indicates very specific changes that are occurring – specifically intrusions of warm, moist air into the region.”

The report breaks down what’s going on at different latitudes above the Arctic Circle, which sits at 65 degrees North. Vaisala’s lightning network uses sensors placed around the world to, in Vagasky’s words, “‘listen’ for the unique signatures produced by lightning” in the form of very low frequency electromagnetic waves associated with the phenomenon. That allows it to detect lightning in far-off places, from the tropics to the Arctic.

The findings show that lightning has stayed relatively constant in the lower reaches of the Arctic. Last year, the region around the Arctic Circle saw 1.9 million lightning detections, roughly in line with where things stood in 2012. But something weird is happening above 80 degrees North.

There, Vaisala’s network has detected a radical uptick in lightning activity. The region saw 7,278 lightning detections in 2021. That’s a relatively small number, especially compared to much lower latitudes—Texas alone, for example, saw nearly 42 million bolts of lightning in 2021—but it’s a sharp rise compared to the previous decade and easily set a record. Most of that activity happened over a three-day period in late July and early August.



A map of global lightning density in 2021. Image: Vaisala

“What we saw was a series of low pressure systems exiting northern Siberia and crossing the Arctic Ocean – that’s the source of lift,” Vagasky said. “High temperatures were approaching or even exceeding 80°F [27 degrees Celsius] on the Arctic coast and very high humidity was funneling northward from central Russia. This created the kind of atmospheric instability typically seen over the Great Plains of the United States during severe weather outbreaks.”

At 85 degrees North, Vaisala detected lightning 634 times. That’s also a record, for a region that’s more accustomed to seeing no lightning at all in some years.

To understand just how weird all this is, consider that the area above 80 degrees North is a stronghold for sea ice. Look at a map of where ice has usually held tight over the past 30 years, and it’s this exact location. But rising land and ocean temperatures eating away at icepack have opened the door for more freak storms and lightning.

Last year’s record amount of lightning is part of a larger trend. In 2019, lightning struck near the North Pole, an event that the National Weather Service said, in typically understated terms, was “certainly unusual.” Research published last year also shows that Arctic is seeing more lightning crisscross the sky, and that it’s likely due to climate change. Yet another study found that lightning-caused wildfires are also increasing. In a region that already has enough to worry about when it comes to climate change, lightning is yet another concern to toss on the pile.

Researchers Pioneer New View Of Deep Rock Fractures For Geothermal Energy

The flow of electrical current signals changes in fractures deep beneath the earth.

By Christina Nunez

Scorchingly hot granite deep underground can be tapped for energy by opening up cracks in the rock. This potential resource, known as enhanced geothermal energy, requires a clear sense of changes happening in the rock over time — a complex picture that can be difficult to capture.

A team led by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has demonstrated a new way to monitor deep subsurface fractures. The technique, electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), gauges underground changes by measuring electrical conductivity in the rock. ERT produces 4D — that is, 3D plus time-lapse — images of the subsurface.

What is an enhanced geothermal system?

Conventional geothermal systems rely on water and flow pathways that are already present within hot rock. An enhanced geothermal system harvests heat trapped within dry rock by introducing water and cracks. Operators drill two underground wells thousands of feet below the surface and then inject fluid at high pressure to fracture the rock between the wells. The fracturing process for heat is similar to what’s known as “fracking” shale rock to release oil and gas.

Temperatures at this level can reach beyond 200°C (392°F). Water pumped from one well to the other and back up to the surface collects heat from the rock, generating steam that can drive a turbine for electricity.

Enhanced geothermal systems could provide an estimated 100 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power 100 million homes. But such systems involve expensive drilling, and they need better monitoring and prediction of underground changes to reduce the uncertainty and risk associated with a given project.

Like any underground environment, enhanced geothermal systems change over time. Fractures in the rock open and close in response to stresses caused by high-pressure fluid injections, changing the system’s heat output. Seismic activity is one indicator of subsurface stress, but information from microseismic monitoring is limited.

“In these deep, hot rocks, it’s too expensive to drill enough monitoring wells to understand what’s going on using direct sampling,” said Tim Johnson, a computational scientist at PNNL who co-authored the study. “The primary focus of this project is to better understand, and ultimately to predict, how fractures are going to behave in a high-stress environment when you try to connect them between two wells.”
Getting a clearer underground picture

ERT involves placing metal electrodes within monitoring boreholes, then imaging the conductivity of the rock when electric current is sent between them. Increases in conductivity over time show where fractures are opening; when fractures are narrower or closed, conductivity goes down. Johnson developed software called E4D that operates on supercomputing systems and converts all of this electrical information to an image that looks a bit like a heat map, showing variations in conductivity over time. E4D won an R&D 100 Award in 2016.

Time-lapse electrical resistivity tomography. (Time-lapse by Tim Johnson, et al. | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

“It’s similar to medical imaging, except that you’re doing a time lapse,” Johnson said. “So you’re watching how things change, and usually the change relates to how the fluid is flowing in the subsurface.”

Johnson and other researchers at PNNL have pioneered the use of ERT as a 3D monitoring tool, and E4D at shallower depths of up to 350 feet, where it has been used to detect and trace contaminants, for example. To test it in the deep subsurface, the team deployed it at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. The work, which is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy through its Geothermal Technologies Office, is part of a larger collaborative effort across DOE to enhance access to natural resources and storage in the subsurface. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory leads the effort, known as the Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) Collab. Partner labs include PNNL, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Pioneering a new subsurface imaging technique

The intent of the ERT monitoring at Sanford was to monitor fluid flow, as had been done at shallower levels. But the results initially didn’t seem to align with those earlier uses.

The experimental testbed located in a mine tunnel 4,850 feet below the surface, in the Sanford Underground Research Facility. (Photo by Hunter Knox | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

After years of hunting for an answer, Johnson found it in scientific papers from the 1960s and 1970s. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had observed changes in the conductivity of crystalline rocks in response to stress — squeezing the rock in lab experiments made it less conductive. This meant the ERT wasn’t simply following fluid underground. It was charting the opening and closing of fractures in response to stress.”What we were seeing with the changes in conductivity didn’t make sense in terms of fluid flow,” Johnson said. But if the conductivity wasn’t reflecting the movement of fluids, what was it showing?

“Once we made that link, everything made sense in terms of what the time-lapse images were doing,” Johnson said.

ERT offers several advantages. With no moving parts and electrodes installed outside the well casing, the equipment is low maintenance and can operate while injections are happening. And the imaging happens in real time, giving facility operators feedback they can use almost immediately, if needed. However, ERT cannot be used with metal wellbore casings, which are ubiquitous in deep subsurface projects.

There are ways around this hurdle, such as using fiberglass casing, coating the casing with a non-metallic epoxy, or using a different, nonmetallic material altogether. But for now, Johnson and team are continuing to improve and test the use of ERT at the Sanford facility.

The paper, “4D Proxy Imaging of Fracture Dilation and Stress Shadowing Using Electrical Resistivity Tomography During High Pressure Injections into a Crystalline Rock Formation,” was published in October in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. Co-authors with Johnson were Jeff Burghardt, Chris Strickland, Hunter Knox, Vince Vermeul, and Mark White at PNNL; Paul Schwering and Doug Blankenship at Sandia National Laboratories; Tim Kneafsey at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and the team at EGS Collab.

Courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

ByU.S. Department of Energy

TEXAS A&M ENGINEER DEVELOPS 3D PRINTED MODELS THAT UNCOVER THE SECRETS BEHIND OPTIMAL FRACKING

PAUL HANAPHY

JANUARY 07TH 2022 

A researcher at Texas A&M University has come up with a novel 3D printing-based approach to accurately simulating the hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ oil and natural gas mining process.

Working with local research university Colorado School of Mines, engineer Gabriel Tatman has managed to develop clear printed models, which reveal the impact of flow materials used during fracking, a phenomenon usually obscured from view.

Made using rock fracture data recovered from actual oil drilling sites, it’s believed that these models could uncover previously-unseen hydraulic fracturing behaviors, and ultimately enable industry firms to optimize their oil and gas recovery efforts.

“We can simulate fracture surfaces by using common geostatistical approaches that capture the characteristics of a particular formation,” explained Tatman. “With 3D printing, we can create physical versions of these simulated surfaces for experiment applications.”

“WE’RE NOT THE FIRST TO 3D PRINT ROCK SURFACES, BUT WE ARE THE FIRST TO DO RESIN 3D PRINTING FOR THIS PARTICULAR APPLICATION.”

Petroleum engineering graduate student Gabriel Tatman holding one of his 3D printed models. Image via Texas A&M University.

Fracking: a contentious mining method

Essentially, ‘fracking’ describes a mining process in which drilling is used to access vast shale oil and gas resources under the sea. To effectively extract these fuels from shale bedrock, water, aggregates and chemicals need to be forced into subsea formations at high pressures, which, according to critics, can cause lasting environmental damage.

Once this initial stage is complete, differently-sized grains of sand called ‘proppants’ are flushed down into the fractures created in a sort of slurry, to hold them open so that oil and gas can flow into a well. Additionally, so-called ‘diverters,’ made of dissolvable/recoverable chemical or mechanical materials, also tend to be used to strategically block proppants’ paths and help direct mined resources.

The eco-impact of fracking aside, the practise remains vital to many nations’ oil reserves, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimating that in 2020, 65% of the country’s crude oil came from shale. However, by its very nature, the mechanics of fracking take place deep underground, making it difficult to fully-understand and perfect.

A fracking oil drilling rig being used in North Dakota. Image via Live Science.

A novel fracking modelling approach

To better understand rock formations, Tatman initially began toying with the idea of using 3D printing as an undergraduate, when he managed to create a casting containing a complex, acid-dissolved flow channel structure. Impressed by his work, Texas A&M Professor Ding Zhu encouraged her student to test the approach’s potential in further studies, eventually leading to his mining model discovery.

Since becoming a postgraduate, Tatman has managed to apply his rock-printing process to simulate fracking, by producing clear samples with a micrometer-level of fracture surface detail. When proppant and diverter are flushed through these models, it’s possible to directly observe their behaviors for the first time, an advance that his Texas A&M colleagues have called “groundbreaking” for shale mining.

Compared to existing proppant flow ‘conductivity’ research, which often relies on the use of standard lab equipment, the researcher’s approach is said to yield more realistic, rough fracture surface models, which can potentially be used to make molds capable of yielding repeatable cement test structures, and ultimately attaining more consistent fracking experiment results.

Acknowledging that the characteristics of fractures tend to vary in each shale formation, Tatman says that his approach will eventually be used to aid future research, by creating a proppant behavior database for different reservoirs.

In fact, the engineer also believes that 3D printing can be deployed in a similar way in other areas, such as gaining an understanding of plugging agent behaviors, in the wormhole geometries formed within acid-treated reservoirs, however, while Tatman is proud of his contribution to the project, he is now set to leave for a full-time industry position.

“(Over) the past five years, the level of development seen in the 3D printing world has been phenomenal,” concluded Tatman. “3D printing has been something I have been passionate about since high school. Being able to bring the hobby side of my life to the research side and integrate both into something productive has been something I’m really proud of.”

According to a Protolabs survey published last year, the oil and gas sector is beginning to warm to the idea of spare part 3D printing. Photo via Protolabs.

3D printing’s oil and gas potential

Due to the remote nature of offshore mining operations, oil and gas firms are increasingly turning to 3D printing to in-source their spare part production, and ensure their drilling plans go interrupted. Protolabs, for instance, released its Decision Time report last year, in which it found that up to 83% of industry firms could now adopt 3D printing in this way.

Energy services provider Hunting PLC has also recognized the technology’s potential in the oil and gas sector, by acquiring 27% of 3D printing bureau Cumberland Additive. In doing so, the firm has made its first move into the additive manufacturing sector, and it’s said to see its acquired technologies as being compatible with the needs of its offshore clientele.

Over in Brazil, Carl Zeiss, SENAI and Petróleo Brasileiro (Petrobras) are also working to advance the application of metal 3D printing within the country’s oil and gas industry. Over the next 18 months or so, the companies aim to validate novel DED and PBF methodologies for producing critical industry components, focusing in particular on the role of powder aging and degradation on defect formation.

To stay up to date with the latest 3D printing news, don’t forget to subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter or follow us on Twitter or liking our page on Facebook.

For a deeper dive into additive manufacturing, you can now subscribe to our Youtube channel, featuring discussion, debriefs, and shots of 3D printing in-action.

Are you looking for a job in the additive manufacturing industry? Visit 3D Printing Jobs for a selection of roles in the industry.

Scientists find surprisingly cool 'hotspots' under Earth's crust

by Charles Q. Choi, Inside Science, American Institute of Physics

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

The hotspots that created volcanic islands such as those of Hawaii, Iceland and the Galapagos Islands may often prove surprisingly cool, a new study finds.

These findings suggest that such hotspots may not always originate from giant plumes of scorching hot rock welling up from near Earth's core as previously thought, scientists noted.

Volcanoes are typically found near the borders of tectonic plates, born from clashes between those giant slabs of rock as they drift on top of the mantle layer between Earth's core and crust. Classic examples of such volcanoes are those that make up the so-called Ring of Fire on the Pacific Rim.

However, volcanoes sometimes erupt in the middle of tectonic plates. The sources of these hotspots might be mantle plumes, mushroom-shaped pillars of hot rock ascending from the deep mantle to sear overlying material like a blowtorch. As tectonic plates wander over such plumes, geologists think chains of volcanic isles can emerge.

Previous research suggested volcanic hotspots are roughly 100 to 300 degrees Celsius (180-540 F) hotter than mid-ocean ridges, where magma rises as tectonic plates spread apart underwater. This supported the view that hotspots were heated by matter from near Earth's hot core and mid-ocean ridges by cooler mantle rock.

Now scientists find that many hotspots are dramatically cooler than previously thought, raising questions about their origins. "A substantial fraction of hotspots do not fit the classical plume model," said Vedran Lekic, a seismologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who did not participate in this study.

In the new study, researchers analyzed the velocity of seismic waves rippling through the mantle underneath oceanic hotspots and ridges to estimate temperatures at those sites. (Seismic waves travel faster through cold rock.)

Roughly 45% of hotspots are more than 155 C (279 F) hotter than mid-ocean ridges. However, about 40% are only 50 to 136 C (90-245 F) hotter than mid-ocean ridges, not particularly hot and therefore not buoyant enough to support the active upwelling of rock from the deep mantle. What's more, roughly 15% of hotspots are especially cold, only 36 C hotter or less than mid-ocean ridges.

To shed light on the origins of these different varieties of hotspots, the scientists also examined the ratio of rarer helium-3 to more common helium-4 in their rock. (The atomic cores of helium-3 each possess just one neutron, whereas helium-4 nuclei each have two.)

Helium found in Earth's crust is mostly helium-4 arising from the breakdown of uranium and other radioactive isotopes over time, whereas helium from deep within Earth is richer in helium-3, likely from reservoirs of ancient material preserving the original ratio found between these isotopes during Earth's first days. The researchers discovered hot hotspots possessed a much higher ratio of helium-3 to helium-4 than cold hotspots did.

Although the classic model of hotspots originating from plumes welling up from the deep mantle may explain hot hotspots, including most of the famous ones, such as those underlying Hawaii, Iceland, the Galapagos, Samoa and Easter Island, "perhaps the truth is that only a few hotspots truly behave like our classical model of mantle plumes and hotspots," said study co-author Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni, a geodynamicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"This reinforces what some researchers have argued previously, which is that the term 'hotspot' is misleading and that volcanoes that don't fit the plate tectonic paradigm should rather be referred to as 'melting anomalies,'" said seismologist Ross Maguire from the University of New Mexico, who did not take part in this research.

Cooler hotspots may instead originate in the upper mantle, or from slow-moving deep plumes that have more time to cool, or from deep plumes that interact with and get cooled by swirling mantle rock. "If this is real, it will be a challenge for geodynamicists to explain such a finding," said Bernhard Steinberger, a geodynamicist at the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam, who was not a part of this work. "These results will doubtlessly trigger new research."

All in all, "the classical view of plumes is not so much flawed than more complex than presented 30 to 50 years ago," Lithgow-Bertelloni said.

Instead, this work "points to a much greater variety among plumes," Steinberger said. "It is kind of like whenever you get a new close-up view of a planet or moon. It has some totally unexpected features. But it is still round."

In the future, the scientists would like to analyze every hotspot in more detail to get an even better sense of their temperatures, Lithgow-Bertelloni said. They also aim to conduct more computer simulations testing various cool hotspot scenarios, she added.

The researchers detailed their findings in the Jan. 7 issue of the journal Science.Only the hottest, most buoyant mantle plumes draw from a primordial reservoir deep in the Earth

More information: Xiyuan Bao et al, On the relative temperatures of Earth's volcanic hotspots and mid-ocean ridges, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abj8944

Journal information: Science 

Provided by Inside Science, American Institute of Physics 

This story is republished courtesy of Inside Science. Read the original story here. Used with permission. Inside Science is an editorially independent news service of the American Institute of Physics. 

Some volcanic hot spots may have a surprisingly shallow heat source

Geologic processes nearer the surface, rather than deep-mantle plumes, may fuel activity there


KILEUA 2018

By Sid Perkins
JANUARY 6, 2022

Some of the world’s volcanic hot spots may be fueled by molten material that originates surprisingly close to Earth’s surface.

While some of the hottest spots are fueled by plumes of buoyant material welling up from deep within Earth, as expected, molten flows driving activity at the coolest hot spots may result from relatively shallow geophysical processes, a new study suggests.

A lot of our planet’s volcanic activity occurs at or near the edges of the tectonic plates that make up Earth’s crust (SN: 1/13/21). At mid-ocean ridges, which often form the boundaries between some tectonic plates, hot material wells up from the mantle — the hot, thick layer that lies between the Earth’s core and its crust — to create fresh crust.

But more mysterious volcanic activity also occurs in many locales in the middle of a tectonic plate, far from mid-ocean ridges, says Xiyuan Bao, a geophysicist at UCLA. The islands of Hawaii, Ascension Island in the South Atlantic and the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are just a few examples of volcanoes created by such activity (SN: 1/29/19).

Volcanic activity that formed the tiny island of Ascension, in the South Atlantic, may have been fueled by shallow geologic processes rather than a deep-mantle plume, a new study suggests.
NASA/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Scientists suspect that many of these sites of isolated volcanism are fed by plumes of hot material rising from deep within the mantle, somewhat akin to small packets of water rising to the surface in a pot of near-boiling water (SN: 9/16/13). But a new analysis by Bao and colleagues, described in the Jan. 7 Science, suggests that some of these isolated hot spots are fueled by material that isn’t as hot as expected, casting doubt that volcanic activity there is driven by deep-mantle plumes. The results could help scientists figure out the mysterious processes unfolding at various sites of volcanism in the interior of plates.

“This study helps sort out which volcanic plumes are deep-seated and which are not,” says Keith Putirka, an igneous petrologist at California State University, Fresno who wasn’t involved in the work.

The team focused on 26 volcanic hot spots in oceanic areas that previous studies had suggested were fed by deep-mantle plumes. The researchers used seismic data to estimate the temperature of mantle material at various depths from 260 to 600 kilometers. In general, the hotter the material is, the slower that seismic waves travel through it.

The team then compared the temperature estimate for each hot spot with the average temperature of mantle material welling up at mid-ocean ridges. Because tectonic plates are pulling apart there, there’s no resistance to upwelling of hot rock from deep in the mantle. That, in turn, provides a baseline against which scientists can compare temperatures of rocks deep beneath isolated hot spots.

Temperatures at mid-ocean ridges average about 1388° Celsius (2530° Fahrenheit). For a dozen of the hot spots the team studied, deep-mantle material was more than 155° C warmer than mid-ocean ridge material, Bao and his team report. Material that hot is more than warm enough to rise to Earth’s surface, chew through overlying crust and create prodigious volcanic activity.

But for 10 hot spots, deep-mantle material ranged between only 50° C and 135° C warmer than mid-ocean ridge material, just warm enough to rise to the surface and through crust. And four of the hot spots were less than 36° C warmer than mid-ocean ridge material, which suggests the hot spot material wouldn’t be able to rise fast enough to sustain buoyancy and break through the crust. Other sorts of geophysical processes occurring closer to Earth’s surface are fueling volcanic activity at these 14 cool-to-middling hot spots, the researchers propose.

“The evidence for mantle plumes under most volcanic islands is lacking,” says Godfrey Fitton, a geochemist at the University of Edinburgh who wasn’t involved in the work. An alternate source of molten material, he suggests, could be areas where tectonic plates collided to help create past supercontinents (SN: 1/11/17).

In those crumpled zones, Fitton explains, Earth’s crust would be thicker and thus help insulate the flow of heat from the mantle to the surface. The buildup of heat in the crust, in turn, could lead to local melting of carbonate-rich rocks that could fuel volcanism. In 2020, he and his colleagues suggested that such processes have fueled volcanism at hot spots off the western coast of Africa and off the northeastern coast of Brazil for the last 50 million years or more.

CITATIONS

X. Bao et al. On the relative temperatures of Earth’s volcanic hotspots and mid-ocean ridges. Science. Vol. 375, January 7, 2022, p. 57. doi: 10.1126/science.abj8944.


A.R. Guilmarães et al. Contemporaneous intraplate magmatism on conjugate South Atlantic margins: A hotspot conundrum. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Vol. 536, April 15, 2020, page 116147-1. doi: 10-1016/j.epsl.2020.116147.

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Explore the Monkey Head Nebula with NASA’s stunning visualization

The Monkey Head Nebula is a star-forming region. Bright, newborn stars in the proximity of nebula's center light up surrounding gas with energetic radiation.

By: Trends Desk | New Delhi |
January 7, 2022 

A beautiful patch of starry sky is visualized by NASA (Source: nasahubble, Instagram)

Star-gazing fills the hearts of inquisitive people. NASA often enamours people with its stunning videos and visualisations about the universe. The space agency has come up with a video of Monkey Head Nebula online, leaving netizens enthralled.

A beautiful patch of starry sky is showcased in the video. As the visual is zoomed through the Monkey Head Nebula, it leaves viewers spellbound. The carved knots of gas and dust in nebula are visible in the visual.


“This spectacular Hubble visualization shows a star-forming region 6,400 light-years away. Hubble imaged the Monkey Head Nebula, formally known as NGC 2174, for its 24th anniversary in 2014,” reads caption of the clip.

The video has garnered over 37,000 likes. Netizens were amazed to watch the visualization. “Beyond amazing,” commented a user. “There are several types of nebulae, right?” asked another user.



The Instagram handle @nasahubble includes a plethora of stunning visuals and images. Astronomy enthusiasts flock the social media account.
ALSO READ |NASA shares video of ‘cosmic rose’, leaves netizens fascinated

According to NASA, nebula is a star-forming region which includes dusky dust clouds silhouetted against glowing gas. The Monkey Head Nebula (also known as NGC 2174) is a star-forming region. Bright, new-born stars in the proximity of nebula’s center light up surrounding gas with energetic radiation.

Is Earth an Oddball? One of the Strangest Things in the Cosmos Might Be – Us

By PAT BRENNAN, NASA'S EXOPLANET EXPLORATION PROGRAM JANUARY 1, 2022

How rare in the galaxy are rocky planets like Earth in similar orbits around Sun-like stars? The question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer.

One of the strangest things in the cosmos might be – us.

Among the thousands of planets confirmed to be in orbit around other stars, we’ve found nothing quite like our home planet. Other planets in Earth’s size range? Sure, by the bushel. But also orbiting a star like our Sun, at a comparable distance? So far it’s just one, lonely example. The one beneath our feet.

A big part of this is likely to be the technical difficulty of finding a sister planet. Our telescopes, in space and on the ground, find planets around other stars by two main methods: wobbles and shadows.

The “wobble” method, or radial velocity, traces the subtle back-and-forth motion as orbiting planets tug their star this way, then that, because of gravity. The larger the tug, the “heavier” the planet — that is, the greater its mass.

In the search for shadows, planet-hunting telescopes wait for a tiny dip in starlight as a planet crosses the face of its star — a crossing known as a “transit.” The bigger the dip, the wider the planet.

In both cases, large planets are much easier to detect than small ones. And in the case of transits, small, rocky planets about the size of Earth show up much better against very small stars known as red dwarfs. In a sense, they cast a bigger shadow that blots out proportionally more of a small star’s light, so instruments like NASA’s TESS space telescope can more readily find them. A Sun-sized star won’t dim as much when an Earth-size planet passes by, making their transits harder to detect.

Apollo 11 Earth image. Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center

And there’s another troubling issue: time. A planet orbiting a star at Earth’s distance from the Sun would take about 365 days to make one revolution – just like our planet’s “year.” But to confirm such an orbit, your telescope would have to stare at that star for, say, 365 days to catch even one transit — and to be sure it’s truly a planet, you’ll want to see at least two or three of these transit signals.

All of these difficulties have placed such planets largely out of reach for today’s instruments. We’ve found plenty of small, rocky planets, but they’re nearly all orbiting red dwarf stars.

In our galaxy, red dwarfs are far more common than larger yellow stars like our Sun. That still leaves room for billions of Sun-like stars and, maybe, a significant number of habitable, Earth-sized worlds circling them.

Or maybe not.

Rare or just difficult?

The apparent oddness of our home system doesn’t end with Earth. Our particular arrangement – small, rocky worlds in the nearest orbits, big gas giants farther out – also is something we haven’t yet detected in close parallel anywhere else. Whether this is because they are truly scarce or because they are hard to detect is unclear.

Jupiter takes one trip around the Sun every 12 years. But Jupiter-type planets in long orbits are comparatively rare around other stars, and that could be important. Theorists say Jupiter might well have cleared the way for Earth to become a habitable world, quite literally. The giant planet’s intense gravity could have hoovered up small rocky bits that might otherwise have smashed into Earth, sterilizing it just as life was getting its start.

“The planetary systems we are finding do not look like our solar system,” said Jessie Christiansen, a research scientist at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute. “Is it important that our solar system is different? We don’t know yet.”

Christiansen, who studies exoplanet demographics, does not think “Earths” will turn out to be rare, but says scientific literature on the question “is all over the place.”

Far more data are needed, scientists tell us, to determine the frequency of planets similar to Earth in both size and circumstance.

Future space telescopes could examine the atmospheres of distant, rocky worlds for signs of oxygen, methane, or carbon dioxide – in other words, an atmosphere that reminds us of home.

For now, we remain in the dark. Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars might be plentiful. Or, they could be the true oddballs of the galaxy.