O n 20 April 2010, the BP-owned, Transoceanoperated Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers and injuring 17, and sending massive quantities of crude oil riddled with lethal toxins from the sea floor into the Gulf of Mexico. Geophysicists, Earth-space scientists, and policymakers continue to debate the cause of the explosion, how much oil has been released, how best to co...

Studies of the energy return on investment (EROI) for oil production generally rely on aggregated statistics for large regions or countries. In order to better understand the drivers of the energy productivity of oil production, we use a novel approach that applies a detailed field-level engineering model of oil and gas production to estimate energy requirements of drilling, producing, processi...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to assess short-term changes in pulmonary function in drill floor workers currently exposed to airborne contaminants generated as a result of drilling offshore. We also aimed to study the prevalence of pulmonary fibrosis using high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) scans of another group of previously exposed drill floor workers. METHODS Pulmonary functio...

This work is devoted to the investigation of oscillations in a drilling system using an induction motor with wound rotor as a drive. It is motivated by the problems of drilling rig failures in the oil and gas industry. The study is based on a modified version of the mathematical model of a drilling rig proposed by scientists from the Eindhoven University of Technology. The model of drilling rig...

There are essentially three main categories of drilling fluids: oil based fluids (OBF’s), synthetic based fluids (SBF’s) and water based fluids (WBF’s). OBF’s have been traditionally been used for their high performance drilling characteristics but tend to have a poor environmental performance in terms of their ecotoxicity and their tendency to persist in cuttings piles on the seafloor. More re...

Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) on their fall migration are exposed to oil exploration activities in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. While previous research into the effect of industrial noise on whale behavior and distribution has noted significant responses, this research has often proceeded from a parametric statistical framework. To account for the presence of spatially autocorrelated and int...

most of the year kept prospectors at bay, there was little to regulate. But as global warming thaws the ocean’s layers, oil giants, shipping companies and even the odd enterprising tourist operator are casting their eyes towards the high north. The biggest boom could be in oil and gas. The US Geological Survey surprised some experts when it declared that a quarter of the world’s undiscovered re...

On a cold day in February 2001, a spacecraft landed on 433 Eros, an asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft had completed its five-year journey to investigate fundamental questions about the nature and origin of near-Earth objects for the first time. The technical demands of the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous NEAR-Shoemaker (NEAR) mission were immense. A multidisciplinar...

Drilling activities in the oil and gas industry have been reported over decades for thousands of wells on a daily basis, yet the analysis of this text at large-scale for information retrieval, sequence mining, and pattern analysis is very challenging. Drilling reports contain interpretations written by drillers from noting measurements in downhole sensors and surface equipment, and can be used ...

Oil and gas drilling operations use drilling fluids (mud) to lubricate the drill bit and stem, transport formation cuttings to the surface, and seal off porous geologic formations. Following completion of the well, waste drilling fluid is often applied to cropland. We studied potential changes in soil compaction as indicated by cone penetration resistance, pH, electrical conductivity (EC(e)), s...