Islam / Khan The Petroleum Engineering Handbook

Sustainable Operations
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-12-799983-8
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 461 Seiten

This is the first book in the petroleum sector that sheds light on the real obstacles to sustainable development and provides solutions to each problem encountered. Each solution is complete with an economic analysis that clarifies why petroleum operations can continue with even greater profit than before while ensuring that the negative environmental impact is diminished. The new screening tools and models proposed in this book will provide one with proper guidelines to achieve true sustainability in both technology development and management of the petroleum sector.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Islam, M. R.

Khan, M. I.

Leseproben

Preface
Nature is perfect, both in space and time. To understand this perfection, one must use the science of intangibles. The premise underlying such a concept is that Nature operates and Humanity detects the tangible effects and formulates a response. However, the response has to take into consideration the role of processes within Nature that have up to now remained inaccessible to our capabilities of detection or measurement and hence “intangible” – either because of where we are looking, or because we become fixated on only certain tangible aspects that can maximize a financial return in the shortest possible time. The hubris of the contemporary scientific and engineering enterprise resides in its bedrock belief that we have dealt with everything of importance and done all the heavy lifting necessary once we have identified all tangible features. However, a little reflection discloses that the tangible aspects of anything do not go beyond very small elements in space, i.e. ?s approaching zero; and even a smaller element in time, i.e. ?t = 0 (meaning, time = “right now”). Hence, the urgency for Humanity to elaborate the science of intangibles has never been greater. From the moment water, air, soil, and fire were identified as ingredients essential for the sustainability of human life until very recently, human beings did not face, and were not compelled to reckon with, a crisis of unsustainability. The time-honored principle that “nature is infinite” is now being challenged because, all of a sudden we discover that natural resources are depleting despite a decline in population in the industrialized world. We discover natural resources are not enough to sustain human civilization. Is this a perception or reality? Some blame seemingly infinite corporate greed for the mess that we are in today. Not that corporate greed cannot be damaging, but, even if corporate greed is infinite, so is the Universe, and we are thus still left with no answer to the question: why this sustainability crisis? There is enough water, air, soil and fire to go around, each element being regenerated through nature’s ecosystem. Each element is recycled and in these processes of recycling, each element enriches itself to make it more suitable for some portion or aspect of natural existence, all of which eventually contributes to the welfare of mankind. This beneficial endpoint derives not from humans being some “superior species”, or “on top of the food chain”, but only from the condition, and to the extent, that humans have the ability to think (Homo sapiens means “thinking man”) and make use of natural processes. This act of thinking, if driven by conscience (science of intangibles), should help us avoid harmful natural products. This awareness should at the same time invoke processes that enhance the natural processes, in order to achieve greater quality of life for all. Innovating science along this line, and engineering solutions to problems accordingly, opens some exciting and compelling prospects. Many of the obstacles built into present-day corporate arrangements could be countered and even shed in the most industrialized countries. Humanity generally would be enabled to counter and shed many other obstacles built into present-day systems of political and economic governance found throughout all countries on this planet. Let all those who remain skeptical about or lack confidence in this overwhelming power realise that this is “an idea whose time has come”: from grasping reliable knowledge of scientific truth, consider what happened in the wake of Galileo’s insistence 350 years ago that the Earth revolves about the Sun. What everyone accepts today as science would not have come into existence without this affirmation – and yet, no one, least of all Galileo himself, actually “saw” the Earth moving around the Sun. Even with modern-day space exploration, no one has been able yet to record the Earth’s actual 365-day transit around the Sun, but without accepting Galileo’s irrefutable conclusion, there would be no modern-day space exploration. Nature is infinite within a closed system. It is infinite as well because it is a closed, i.e. complete, system. Because of this infinite dimension, Nature is also perfect (balanced). So, what is the origin of the imbalance and unsustainability that seems to manifest itself so ubiquitously, in the atmosphere, the soil and the oceans? As the “most intelligent creation of nature”, men were expected to at least stay out of the natural ecosystem. Einstein might have had doubts about human intelligence or the infinite nature of the Universe (as evidenced in his often-quoted remark that “there are two things that are infinite, human stupidity and the Universe, and I am not so sure about the Universe”), but human history tells us human beings always managed to go with the infinite nature of Nature. From central American Mayans to Egyptian Pharaohs, from Chinese Hans to the Mannaeans of Persia, the Edomites of the Petra Valley to the Indus Valley civilization of the Asian subcontinent, all managed to remain in harmony with nature. They were not necessarily “righteous” people nor were they free from practices that we would no longer countenance (Pharaohs sacrificed humans to accompany the dead royal for the resurrection day), but they did not produce a single gram of inherently anti-nature product, such as DDT. In the modern age, we managed to give a Nobel Prize (in medicine) for that “invention”. What becomes clear is this: whatever it was that our ancestors did in terms of technology remains something to be desired today. Consider the marvels of the people who carved rocks in the crystal valley of Petra. What did these people use to cut rock? It surely was not lasers, or nucleo-thermal devices, or even TNT. What did the builders of pyramids use to calculate precisely the shapes that defies today’s mathematicians, computer designers, and architectures combined? It surely was not linear algebra, finite elements, or even number-crunching supercomputers. What did the makers of the Taj Mahal use to ensure continuous waterjets flowing through fountains, air conditioning inside the building, and the evergreen lushness of the trees? It was not electric pumps, freon, or synthetic fertilizers. What did the chemical engineers of Egypt use to preserve the mummies for thousands of years? It was not formalin, bezoate, and numerous other toxins that we call “preservatives”. Today, we brag about how we do things better, faster, and cheaper. Yet, we took longer to carve out four faces in Mount Rushmore than the stone-carvers of the Petra Valley took in making those stunning crystal valleys out of solid rocks. We took longer to carve out the monument of Crazy Horse than did the makers of the Taj Mahal. Not only did we take longer, we made an immeasurable mess by using TNT and other inherently anti-nature explosives. Today, we brag about a quantum leap in all branches of sciences, yet we only recently discovered our knowledge is nowhere close to what our ancestors had many years ago. We have to ponder what was the basis for Harrapan mathematics, Jain and Tamil mathematics, or Babylonian and Sumerian mathematics. Only recently we discovered Islamic scholars were doing mathematics some 1,000 years ago of the same order that we think we discovered in the 1970s1 – the difference being that our mathematics can only track symmetry, something that does not exist in nature. Recently, a three-dimensional PET-scan of a relic known as the Antikythera Mechanism has demonstrated that it was actually a universal navigational computing device – with the difference being that our current-day versions rely on GPS, tracked and maintained by satellite.2 We would also be shocked to find out what Ibn Sina (Avicenna) said regarding nature being the source of all cures still holds true3 – with the proviso that not a single quality given by nature in the originating source material of, for example, some of the most advanced pharmaceuticals used to “treat” cancer remains intact after being subject to mass production and accordingly stripped of its powers actually to cure and not merely “treat”, i.e. delay, the onset or progress of symptoms. What are we missing? This book recognizes that civilization is driven by energy needs and uses the modern-day supplier of energy needs, viz., petroleum engineering, as the case study. The book challenges readers with the pointed question, “If we have progressed as a human race, why has our efficiency in sustaining human civilization regressed?” For every phase of petroleum operations, ranging from exploration to refining, the authors investigate the root cause of the failure in sustainability. Once the cause is identified, it becomes quite simple to recommend practices that are sustainable. Once sustainable practices are in place, never again should petroleum operations be synonymous with polluting the environment. This book could be a textbook on fundamentals of sustainable energy management, yet it is called a “handbook”. It is so because it gets beyond the smokescreen of “blue sky”, i.e. fundamental, science, tackling the justifications for various engineering practices to show exactly which practices are responsible for which effects and thus how simple it would be to remedy those practices to come up with solutions that are starkly different from the ones...