Most tidal energy initiatives focus on shallow waters, which are technically less challenging to tap into, but yield far less power.

A semi-submersible tidal power generator based on wind energy technology could allow the UK to meet a significant chunk of its electricity needs from deep coastal waters, according to engineers working on the project.
The TidalStream system, which has already been tested in the Thames, would harness power from the fast-flowing waters found at depths of 40m or more, where an estimated 63 percent of the UK’s tidal energy resource is estimated to be.
Most tidal energy initiatives focus on shallow waters, which are technically less challenging to tap into, but yield far less power. Tides in the 60m-deep Pentland Firth off the northern tip of Scotland, for example, generate water flows of up to three million tons/sec, and tidal speeds averaging 1.5 to 2.2m/sec--some of the fastest in the world. By harnessing this, TidalStream believes this single location could supply five percent of the UK’s electricity demands, e4engineering.com said.
The system was designed by Dr. John Armstrong, former technical director of Taylor Woodrow’s Wind Energy Group. It consists of turbines mounted on semi-submersible spar buoys tethered to sea bed anchors by swing-arms.
If maintenance is required, water used as ballast is pumped out of the spar, allowing the turbine to roll over and swing up to the surface. It is then accessible in the same way as a fixed platform such as an oil rig.
’An operational system should be up and running by 2010, subject to funding,’ said company director Michael Todman, a former Rolls- Royce chief engineer.
’One of the biggest advantages of this is that maintenance does not involve anyone having to get into the water.’
The turbines consist of four 20m rotors. Each four-rotor turbine is rated at 4MW. They operate while floating submerged in the middle of the tidal stream. A swing-arm allows the turbine to follow the water’s flow direction as the tides change to generate the maximum power.
They can be floated into place before their ballast tanks are flooded to submerge them, removing the need for the use of cranes and barges.
According to TidalStream’s calculations, turbines with a capacity equivalent to a 1200MW nuclear power station would take a sea area of 14km2.
The cost of the turbines and their electricity should be comparable to that of offshore wind farms, but with the advantage of 100 percent predictability of output, claim the developers.
A model of the concept has been successfully tested in the Thames at Chiswick, and TidalStream is now seeking funding to take the project further.

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member Libya aims to increase its current crude production of 1.7 million barrels per day (mbpd) to 2mbpd by mid-2006, a level it has not seen since the late 1970s, and to 3 mbpd by 2010, the country’s Oil Minister Fathi Bin Shatwan said.
The bulk of the increase in production is expected to come from past and future oil licensing rounds, he said. In order to achieve this goal, and also to upgrade its oil infrastructure in general, Libya estimates it will need total investment of around $30 billion to be shared by Tripoli and foreign partners.
The North African country intends to offer a total of 261 oil and gas blocks in the next decade in addition to the two bid rounds already offered since late last year. On October 3, Libya awarded 17 international oil and gas companies, including US supermajor ExxonMobil, acreage in its second post-sanctions bid round, which Libyan officials said attracted bids from 51 foreign oil companies and will draw investments of $483 million into the country, tradearabia.com said.

Upgrading of Refineries
In a telephone interview with Platts, Shatwan also said the country was looking to an upgrade of its five domestic refineries, with combined nameplate capacity of around 380,000 bpd, in “a few years“ and build new plants with foreign company help.
“We aim in the future to have a refining capacity of 30-50 percent of our total crude production...We have already some companies coming to Libya to invest in refineries,“ he said.
The country’s refining sector was hard hit by UN sanctions, specifically UN Resolution 883 of November 11, 1993, which banned Libya from importing refinery equipment.
Libya’s refineries include the 220,000 bpd Ras Lanuf export refinery on the Gulf of Sirte, completed in 1984; the 120,000 bpd Az Zawiya refinery, completed in 1974 and located in northwest Libya; the 20,000 bpd Tobruk refinery; the 10,000 bpd Brega plant, the country’s oldest refinery; and the 10,000 bpd Sarir refinery.
In May 2002, Libya signed a $280 million contract with South Korea’s LG Petrochemicals to upgrade Az Zawiya.

Tamoil Negotiations Ongoing
Libya also has operations in Europe and is a direct producer and distributor of refined products in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Egypt. In Italy, Libya owns Milan-based Tamoil Italia, which controls about 7.5 percent of the country’s retail market for oil products and lubricants, which are distributed through around 2,200 Tamoil service stations.
Shatwan declined to comment on rumors that Italy’s ERG has been tipped to buy a significant stake in Tamoil. “There are discussions about this and there are negotiations...but it is not something we want to discuss,“ the minister said.
Earlier this year, Libyan ruler Moammar Qadhafi’s son Saadi Qadhafi, who represents Tamoil in Italy, told the Financial Times that negotiations were in progress with “many Italian companies.“

Stung by the rising international price of oil and domestic shortages coupled with high requirements of a growing economy, India has revived a plan for an oil and gas grid for the Asian continent.
The grid is part of a two-fold strategy by the two top Asian oil guzzlers, China and India, to ensure reliable delivery networks and energy security. The other element involves acquiring stakes in production and exploration projects for which New Delhi and Beijing continue to cooperate as well as compete.
The emphasis on the grid comes in wake of reports that India and China, the most aggressive shoppers for oil and gas assets in the world, are coming together to put in a joint bid. The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), two of the most high-profile emerging global oil companies in the past year, could jointly bid for Petro-Canada’s $1-billion oil and gas fields in Syria. Both India and China feel the strategic need to diversify their energy sources from the current dependence on West Asia, atimes.com said.
Asia is no longer marginal to the global oil and gas economy, said India’s Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar in his inaugural address at the ministerial round table on cooperation between North and Central Asian producers in New Delhi two weeks ago.
“The era when our production was controlled by others is now behind us, the era when the bulk of consumers lived in other continents is also over,“ he said. “Already, two-thirds of the oil extracted from the bowels of West Asia and Southeast Asia finds its way to the markets of Turkey, India, China, Korea, Japan and other consumption centers in Asia.“
The round table, the second being hosted by India, has brought together oil-producing countries including Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan in dialogue with the principal Asian consumer nations--China, Japan, Korea and India.
This is not the first time India has raised such a proposal. At an Asian gas-buyers meeting in New Delhi in February, Aiyar exhorted assembled nations, including China and Saudi Arabia, to build a pan-Asian gas grid and end “the wretched Western dominance“.
Reiterating India’s resolve, he said producers and consumers could jointly invest in infrastructure to gain energy security for the region. “We can together invest in exploration, production, transportation, shipbuilding and shipping, in ports and terminals. We can together build refineries and gas-processing plants and power-generation stations and petrochemical units; in short, we can together take on the world. That would be true energy security.“
South Korea, Asia’s fourth-largest oil consumer, has backed India’s efforts to create an Asian oil and gas order by setting up an inter-state oil and gas-transportation system.
“Trade in oil within Asia remains marginal,“ Korean Minister of Commerce, Industry and Energy Hee Beem Lee said. “The work that is urgently needed is a master plan that links all the points in Asia through what can be called, the Inter-Asia Oil and Gas Transportation System.
“To solidify this effort, I propose that a working group be established with all the countries in Asia represented, and its first meeting be held in the first half of next year in Korea. North and Central Asia, which includes Russia and the Caspian Sea region, were increasingly important to global oil supply. Large oil fields with pipelines are being developed, and with it Central Asia is emerging as a major oil resource region. But the unresolved problem of transporting the oil is holding back the full potential of oil trade within Asia.“
Meanwhile, Aiyar said a Japanese proposal to study the possibility of networking the countries of Central, South and East Asia and elsewhere as well as an initiative to promote a sustainable and flexible energy system (SAFE) were endorsed. It was agreed that practical steps be taken bilaterally and regionally, as well as globally, for networking the knowledge base of participating countries in the development of the Asian oil and gas sector and the energy economy in general.
The importance of mutual cross-investment to reinforce mutual trade in oil and gas and associated downstream industry was emphasized as the optimal means of promoting stability, security and sustainability in the Asian oil and gas economy, he said. “It was emphasized that environment-friendly investment in upstream and downstream projects should be encouraged.“
Asia has emerged as a major oil consumption center, with current consumption about 40% of the world total of about 82 million barrels per day. Against the increase in global oil consumption of about 3.3% in 2004, Asian consumption increased by more than 5%. Asia is projected to continue to be the dominant oil-consuming center in the next 20-25 years.
Beijing imports a third of its oil supplies, accounting for as much as 7% of the world demand at 5.46 million barrels a day. India, on the other hand, imports as much as two-thirds of its oil needs, consuming about 2 million barrels a day.
According to estimates, if the Indian economy maintains its robust growth, by 2025 it could be consuming 7.4 million barrels a day. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stated that emphasis on energy security is second only to food security for the country. New Delhi has also been zealously pursuing its bid to access international civilian nuclear-energy technology, post the far-reaching pact signed with US in July.

These sensors will monitor the flows of the oil, water or other fluids that are pumped into the rock reservoir to displace the hydrocarbon deposits.

The reason we drill for oil and gas in the way that we do is, largely, because that’s how we’ve always done it. But as the more easily obtainable reserves begin to dwindle, the established techniques are becoming less useful.
When it becomes harder both3 to find and to extract fossil fuel reserves, how can current advances in engineering help to meet the demand for hydrocarbons and their products?
This is the question facing Geoff Maitland, professor of energy engineering at Imperial College London’s recently launched Energy Futures Laboratory (EFL). While the laboratory is looking at the whole spectrum of energy-related research, Maitland is focused on the parts of the jigsaw concerned with fossil fuels, their exploitation and their transformation into useful products.
Imperial College is the sort of place that people find hard to leave behind and, like many of his colleagues, Maitland is on his second stint there. Starting out as a physical chemist, with a degree and doctorate from Oxford, he initially followed an academic path, working as an ICI-sponsored postdoc at Bristol University and transferring to Imperial as a chemical engineering lecturer until 1986, according to e4engineering.com.
His research centered around the links between the interactions of molecules and colloidal particles in fluids and the bulk properties of materials, and during his first stint at Imperial he specialized in polymer dynamics, rheology and design of chemical reactors.
He then decided to switch to the industrial track, working for oilfield technology company Schlumberger for 20 years.
It was at Schlumberger that he began to specialize in fossil fuels, initiating research on characterizing how drilling fluids, crude oils and multiphase mixtures flow.
This September Maitland brought his expertise--in the behavior of the thermal and physical properties of fluids under extreme conditions, the activity of complex mixtures as they flow through the geology of oilfields and the various parts of the oil well, and the environmental impact of oil production--back to South Kensington to link up with the other scientists and engineers involved in the EFL.
’Several universities, such as Stanford in the US and Heriot Watt in Edinburgh, have extremely strong energy research programs,’ he said, ’but what’s unique about what we have here is that we have world-class science and engineering across the board. The EFL is designed to link up all the strands of the research so that we can carry out multidisciplinary projects much more easily.’
Maitland thinks of his work as shedding the technological baggage of oil production. ’The approach we have to take is to say, if we discovered fossil fuels now, what would we do? Given today’s environment, where, as well as producing power and fuels and the feedstocks for petrochemicals and plastics, we have to be mindful of the environmental viewpoint, can we be innovative using today’s technologies?’
Some of Maitland’s work has carried straight over from his time at Schlumberger, and this centres around the advanced control and instrumentation technologies used in the most up-to-date petrochemical plants within an oil well to improve its productivity.
Oil companies are increasingly using sensors to log the performance of their wells, but Maitland’s researchers are trying to take this concept one stage further.
’One crucial factor is the advances in sensor technology, particularly in the scale of the sensors,’ he said. ’We’re seeing the micronization--and even, in future, the “nanoization“--of sensors, and that enables you both to put them in difficult locations and to build in redundancy, so you can have plenty of sensors in place to cope with the harsh conditions.’
These sensors will monitor the flows of the oil, water or other fluids that are pumped into the rock reservoir to displace the hydrocarbon deposits.
’The reservoir models are also becoming more sophisticated, linking the geology to the characterization of the pore space, the fracture pathways and the fluid mechanics that support that,’ Maitland said.
Linking the sensor readings with the reservoir model will allow oil firms to understand which parts of the reservoir are currently producing oil, and which are becoming saturated with the injection fluids. A series of valves within the well would then allow sections without oil to be isolated, and the injection strategy changed to recover a larger volume of oil.