OMV, Exxon start drilling in Romanian waters of Black Sea
Bucharest, Romania (UPI) Oct 27, 2014 -
Austrian energy company OMV and U.S. counterpart, Exxon Mobil, said Monday drilling started into a new reserve prospect off the Romanian coast.
Both companies announced the start of operations at a new prospect dubbed Neptun in the Romanian waters of the Black Sea.
Gabriel Selischi, an exploration and production director at OMV, said the Black Sea plays a central role in its offs ...
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China oil demand near decade high for September
Beijing (UPI) Oct 27, 2014 -
Despite an economic slowdown, Chinese government data show oil demand is at one of the highest levels in nearly a decade.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said in its October report the global economy should grow by 0.6 percent next year to 3.6 percent. The Chinese and Indian economies should remain flat, while Europe continues to falter.
Though treading water, a ...
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Citgo no longer for sale, Venezuelan minister says
Caracas, Venezuela (UPI) Oct 27, 2014 -
Venezuela's finance minister said the government has shelved plans to sell off the U.S. subsidiary of state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela.
A decline in global oil prices is hurting economies like Venezuela's that rely heavily on oil exports for revenue. Venezuelan newspaper El Universal reported high inflation in the country is eroding consumer purchasing power by as much as 12 pe ...
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Eni says new gas find off Indonesia good for LNG hopes
Milan, Italy (UPI) Oct 27, 2014 -
Italian energy company Eni said Monday there may be as much as 1.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas at an exploration prospect off the Indonesian coast.
Eni said it made the discovery in the deep waters. Dubbed Merakes, the prospect is about 100 miles south of the country's Bontang liquefied natural gas plant.
Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi said in a statement the new gas find could ...
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Goldman forecast erases momentum from oil markets
New York (UPI) Oct 27, 2014 -
While the European economy should be able to survive another crisis, a grim forecast Monday from Goldman Sachs pushed oil prices downward.
West Texas Intermediate crude oil for December delivery pushed below $80 per barrel, dropping more than $1.20 to $79.76 in early Monday trading.
Brent, the international benchmark price, fared no better, shedding $1.25 early Monday to post $84 ...
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South Korean company takes stake in Oklahoma shale basin
Oklahoma City (UPI) Oct 27, 2014 -
U.S. shale player Continental Resources said Monday it has signed a deal with a South Korean company to develop its gas assets in Oklahoma.
Continental, which has headquarters in Oklahoma City, announced it sold 49.9 percent of its stake in the Northwest Cana Woodford shale basin to South Korean conglomerate SK Group for roughly $360 million.
"We are excited to establish this joi ...
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Spain's Repsol makes major oil find in Gulf of Mexico
Houston (UPI) Oct 27, 2014 -
Spanish energy company Respol said Monday it made what it said was a significant discovery of oil in the U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The company said it ran through a 492-foot thick column of oil about 200 miles off the coast in Louisiana in the ultra-deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The company made the discovery in the Leon well in the Keathley Canyon 642 block.
Repsol ...
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Abducted Chinese worker freed in Sudan: minister
Khartoum (AFP) Oct 24, 2014 -
Sudan's security forces have freed a Chinese worker abducted last week in the conflict-hit West Kordofan region, the oil minister said on Friday.
"The security apparatus has been working day and night to reach the perpetrators and free the hostage," Oil Minister Makkawi Mohamed Awad said in a statement carried by official SUNA news agency.
The Chinese embassy in Khartoum did not immediat ...
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British study raises questions about wind energy reliability
London (UPI) Oct 27, 2014 -
The British power grid may need to complement its wind energy output with fossil fuels to make up for production gaps, a study finds.
Though coal still dominates the British power sector, the country is emerging as a wind energy leader, and is the world leader in offshore wind installations.
A report from the Adam Smith Institute finds seasonal variations in wind energy output me ...
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Boosting Biogasoline Production in Microbes
Berkeley CA (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
In the on-going effort to develop advanced biofuels as a clean, green and sustainable source of liquid transportation fuels, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have identified microbial genes that can improve both the tolerance and the production of biogasoline in engineered strains of Escherichia coli.
Aindrila Mukhopadhyay, a chemist who ...
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Watching the hidden life of materials
Montreal, Canada (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
Researchers at McGill University have succeeded in simultaneously observing the reorganizations of atomic positions and electron distribution during the transformation of the "smart material" vanadium dioxide (VO2) from a semiconductor into a metal - in a time frame a trillion times faster than the blink of an eye.
The results, reported in Science, mark the first time that experiments have ...
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Molecular electronics process enables DNA-based computer circuitry
Jerusalem, Israel (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
In a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, an international group of scientists announced the most significant breakthrough in a decade toward developing DNA-based electrical circuits.
The central technological revolution of the 20th century was the development of computers, leading to the communication and Internet era. The main measure of this evolution is miniaturization: making our ...
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Three-dimensional metamaterials with a natural bent
Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
Metamaterials, a hot area of research today, are artificial materials engineered with resonant elements to display properties that are not found in natural materials. By organizing materials in a specific way, scientists can build materials with a negative refractivity, for example, which refract light at a reverse angle from normal materials.
However, metamaterials up to now have harbored ...
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Where Did All the Oil Go
Santa Barbara CA (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
Due to the environmental disaster's unprecedented scope, assessing the damage caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been a challenge. One unsolved puzzle is the location of 2 million barrels of submerged oil thought to be trapped in the deep ocean.
UC Santa Barbara's David Valentine and colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) and UC Irvi ...
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Liquid helium offers new way to make charged molecules
Leicester, UK (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
A collaboration between researchers at the Universities of Leicester and Innsbruck has developed a completely new way of forming charged molecules which offers tremendous potential for new areas of chemical research.
Professor Andrew Ellis from our Department of Chemistry has been working for several years with colleagues at the Institute of Ion Physics in Austria on exploring the chemistr ...
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OPDE begins construction of a new 8 MWp solar farm in UK
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
OPDE has begun construction of a new 8.9 MWp solar farm near Eastbourne, in East Sussex. The new solar farm represents a total investment of over Pounds 7, 9 million and is scheduled to be connected to the electricity network by this December.
The PV plant will comprise approximately 35,200 solar modules and will generate enough electricity to meet the equivalent annual demand of approxim ...
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Cutting power could dramatically boost laser output
Princeton NJ (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
Lasers - devices that deliver beams of highly organized light - are so deeply integrated into modern technology that their basic operations would seem well understood. CD players, medical diagnostics and military surveillance all depend on lasers.
Re-examining longstanding beliefs about the physics of these devices, Princeton engineers have now shown that carefully restricting the delivery ...
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Developing environmentally friendly Li-ion batteries
Richmond VA (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
Physics researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University have discovered that most of the electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries - commonly found in consumer electronic devices - are superhalogens, and that the vast majority of these electrolytes contain toxic halogens.
At the same time, the researchers also found that the electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries (also known as Li-ion batt ...
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New evidence for an exotic, predicted superconducting state
Providence RI (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
Superconductors and magnetic fields do not usually get along. But a research team led by a Brown University physicist has produced new evidence for an exotic superconducting state, first predicted a half-century ago, that can indeed arise when a superconductor is exposed to a strong magnetic field.
"It took 50 years to show that this phenomenon indeed happens," said Vesna Mitrovic, assoc ...
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Global boom in hydropower expected this decade
Copenhagen, Denmark (SPX) Oct 28, 2014 -
An unprecedented boom in hydropower dam construction is underway, primarily in developing countries and emerging economies. While this is expected to double the global electricity production from hydropower, it could reduce the number of our last remaining large free-flowing rivers by about 20 percent and pose a serious threat to freshwater biodiversity.
A new database has been developed t ...
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