Total, CNOOC expand LNG ties
Washington DC (UPI) Mar 26, 2014 -
French energy company Total said it agreed to supply the Chinese market with an additional 1 million tons of LNG per year under the terms of a deal with CNOOC.
Total under the terms of an existing 15-year contract with China National Office Oil Corp. supplies the Chinese market with 1 million tons of liquified natural gas per year. Total said it would review the price arrangement on exi ...
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China's Xi talks culture in France but business prevails
Paris (AFP) March 27, 2014 -
After a day devoted to multi-billion-dollar business deals, Chinese leader Xi Jinping trained his sights on culture and history Thursday on the last day of his lavish visit to France.
Yet business was still the talk of the day at an economic forum on the margins of the three-day state visit, as French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici called for more Chinese investment in France in a bid to ...
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British greenhouse gas emissions decline
Washington DC (UPI) Mar 26, 2014 -
Greenhouse gas emissions in the United Kingdom declined 2 percent last year because of a decrease in the use of fossil fuels, the government said Thursday.
The British Department of Energy and Climate Change issued reports highlighting energy use and emission from 2013.
DECC figures show emissions have been on a general decline since the 1990s. The government attributed last year ...
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Facebook wants to beam the Internet from the sky
San Francisco (AFP) March 27, 2014 -
Facebook revealed Thursday it has a lab working on using drones, satellites and solar-powered planes to provide web access around the world.
"We've been working on ways to beam Internet to people from the sky," Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on the leading social network.
The team at the Connectivity Lab builds on a quest by Facebook-launched Internet.org to ...
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Global support for reduction in govt control of web domain names
Singapore (AFP) March 27, 2014 -
A plan to give control of the Internet's technical operations to a diverse range of groups, including governments and businesses, instead allowing the state sole power, is gathering international support, participants at a Singapore meeting on the web's future said Thursday.
The meeting convened by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was the first since the US gov ...
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Pass Keystone for security's sake, supporters say
Washington DC (UPI) Mar 26, 2014 -
Bipartisan leaders from Northern Plains states joined the oil industry in calling for approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline for national security's sake.
Pipeline company TransCanada submitted a permit for U.S. federal approval for the proposed 1,179-mile pipeline from Canada south into the United States more than five years ago. The permit is needed because the pipeline would cross ...
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Gulf Keystone feeling bullish about Iraqi oil
Washington DC (UPI) Mar 26, 2014 -
Though gross production for 2013 slumped, Gulf Keystone Petroleum, active in the Kurdish oil sector of Iraq, said Thursday it had a successful year.
The company, which has headquarters in London, said gross production for 2013 declined more than 40 percent from the previous year to 496,921 barrels of oil. Its sales, all of which came from the Shaikan reserve area in the Kurdish north of ...
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Microsoft delivers Office for rival Apple's iPad as PCs lose ground
San Francisco (AFP) March 27, 2014 -
Microsoft unveiled a version of its popular Office software suite for iPad tablets Thursday as the company's new chief moved to expand its "Internet cloud" footprint.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella laid out a vision of making the company the master of programs and services offered in the cloud for whatever gadgets people prefer.
The US technology titan underscored that goal with ...
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Appraisal wells completed for Johan Sverdrup
Washington DC (UPI) Mar 26, 2014 -
Swedish energy company Lundin Petroleum said Thursday it completed two appraisal wells in the Johan Sverdrup prospect in the Norwegian waters of the North Sea.
Lundin said appraisal well 16/3-8S encountered an oil layer measuring about 42 feet thick and tested at 4,900 barrels of oil per day. Well 16/3-8 S T2 was drilled to examine the properties of the reservoir and data were being an ...
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Gazprom wants bigger stake in LNG market
Washington DC (UPI) Mar 26, 2014 -
Russian energy company Gazprom said it aims to seize 15 percent of the global market share of liquified natural gas within the next 15 years.
The Gazprom board of directors met in Moscow to observe emerging trends in the global energy sector. The company since entering the LNG market in 2005 sold cargoes to a dozen different companies and expanded its footprint in the sector with its Sa ...
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Tullow upbeat about Kenyan oil prospects
Washington DC (UPI) Mar 26, 2014 -
British energy explorer Tullow Oil said Thursday some of its oil reserve areas in Kenya were poorly developed, though it remained upbeat about the potential.
Tullow announced exploration results from Blocks 10BB and 13T, which it operates in parity with Africa Oil Corp.
Tullow said it encountered a "poorly developed oil bearing reservoir" in Block 13T, though deploying rigs elsew ...
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Researchers Engineer Resistance to Ionic Liquids in Biofuel Microbes
Berkeley CA (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Berkeley Lab, have identified the genetic origins of a microbial resistance to ionic liquids and successfully introduced this resistance into a strain of E. coli bacteria for the production of advanced biofuels. The ionic liquid resistance is based on a pair of genes ...
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Ultra-Thin Light Detectors
Vienna, Austria (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
A new, extremely thin kind of light detectors was created at Vienna University of Technology. Two very different technologies were combined for the first time: metamaterials and quantum cascade structures. Subtle interactions of electrons and light make them so valuable for technology: ultra-thin systems of semiconductor layers can turn electrical voltage into light.
But they can also be u ...
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Big Data keeps complex production running smoothly
Lemgo, Germany (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
Large amounts of data are produced when industrial companies monitor their facilities. Sensors check temperature, pressure, power, or energy use data. "If you're scanning to the nearest second, it's easy to rack up several terabytes of information in under a week," says Dr. Olaf Sauer from the automation business unit at the IOSB. But often there is a lack of suitable methods to evaluate the inf ...
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Engineered bacteria produce biofuel alternative for high-energy rocket fuel
Emeryville CA (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Joint BioEnergy Institute have engineered a bacterium to synthesize pinene, a hydrocarbon produced by trees that could potentially replace high-energy fuels, such as JP-10, in missiles and other aerospace applications. With improvements in process efficiency, the biofuel could supplement limited supplies of petroleum-based JP-10, and mig ...
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Scientists watch nanoparticles grow
Hamburg, Germany (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
With DESY's X-ray light source PETRA III, Danish scientists observed the growth of nanoparticles live. The study shows how tungsten oxide nanoparticles are forming from solution. These particles are used for example for smart windows, which become opaque at the flick of a switch, and they are also used in particular solar cells. The team around lead author Dr. Dipankar Saha from Arhus University ...
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New way to filter light
Boston MA (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
Light waves can be defined by three fundamental characteristics: their color (or wavelength), polarization, and direction. While it has long been possible to selectively filter light according to its color or polarization, selectivity based on the direction of propagation has remained elusive.
But now, for the first time, MIT researchers have produced a system that allows light of any colo ...
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Controlling electron spins by light
Berlin, Germany (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
Researchers of HZB manipulate the electron spin at the surface of topological insulators systematically by light. Topological insulators are considered a very promising material class for the development of future electronic devices.
A research team at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) has discovered, how light can be used to alter the physical properties of the electrons in these materials. ...
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Scientists Track 3D Nanoscale Changes in Rechargeable Battery Material During Operation
Upton NY (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have made the first 3D observations of how the structure of a lithium-ion battery anode evolves at the nanoscale in a real battery cell as it discharges and recharges. The details of this research, described in a paper published in Angewandte Chemie, could point to new ways to engineer battery materials to increase the ...
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Record quantum entanglement of multiple dimensions
Barcelona, Spain (SPX) Mar 28, 2014 -
The states in which elementary particles, such as photons, can be found have properties which are beyond common sense. Superpositions are produced, such as the possibility of being in two places at once, which defies intuition.
In addition, when two particles are entangled a connection is generated: measuring the state of one (whether they are in one place or another, or spinning one way o ...
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