LifeItself

I just attended an SPE workshop, "Oil and Gas Technology for a Net-Zero World – Defining Our Grand Challenges for the Next Decade."  Of the 60 people in the audience, I knew 1/3, some very well.  It makes sense, because I have been an SPE member for 40 years, and a Distinguished Member for 20 years.  Last year, I received an SPE EOR/IOR Pioneer Award for my work at Shell and UC Berkeley on the thermal enhanced oil recovery processes that involved foams, and their upscaling to field operations. This was nice, because Shell recognized me as one of their best reservoir engineers, and in 1985 I received an internal Shell Recognition Award for the same work. But I am not a mere oil & gas reservoir engineer.  First and foremost, I am a chemical engineer and physicist, who has thought rigorously about the sustainability of human civilization , ecology and thermodynamics of industrial agriculture and large biofuel systems, as well as about the overall gross and net prima...

I just arrived in Saudi Arabia after 17 hours of flights from the U.S.  My wife and I attended our son's beautiful wedding in Sonoma, California, bonded with our children, students and many friends, and I attended the largest Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) conference in Houston, where I realized that I knew most people over fifty.  Kind of scary, but what can one expect after being an SPE member for 33 years? The Patzek family in Sonoma, California, just before the latest enlargement. You may ask what are my impressions from America after a nine-month absence?  There are many positive impressions and some are mixed.  First, we miss America. I loved the lush green trees in Texas, and the beautiful live oaks everywhere I looked in my Austin neighborhood.  I loved being with my children, friends and neighbors.  I did not like the rampant inflation of the cost of food and most living necessities.  This inflation has been at least 10% per year ...

I wrote this blog on August 2 and 3, 2013, after my arrival in Warsaw. In 8 hours, this marvel of modern technology, Boeing 787 DreamLiner, transplanted me from Chicago to Warsaw, and three hours later, after a fabulous dinner at a by-the-word-of-mouth-only home food diner, here I was on the Nowy Świat Street, walking towards the Old Town and the Royal Palace. Literally every building I passed by had a plaque commemorating those murdered there during the war (World War II for the younger audience) and ten bloody years of the Stalinist terror after the war.  Every beautifully kept old building and church or cathedral I passed was meticulously rebuilt after the war.  For all of them perished during the war, together with the people of Warsaw. Please click on the image to see it in high resolution. All of these buildings were destroyed during WWII.  Some of the heaviest fighting during the Warsaw Uprising occurred not far from here.  But today you see a sparkling...

Angela Kelechi Eluwa   is a graduate of Geology from Nigeria, and is currently a Master of Science Student in the Energy and Earth Resources Department at UT Austin. The human species has been growing exponentially since the World War II. Any population of living creatures is constrained by the availability of food, water, land, or other important resources. Once those resources are depleted, a population won't continue to grow exponentially. It will plateau, or decline, as a result of disease or malnutrition. The major driver of technology is fossil power (energy/over time) . The accumulation of fossil fuels is a slow process that took hundreds of millions of years, yet in just the last few hundred years we have depleted a large percentage of their total accessible endowment. It can be argued that technological advancement has made a major positive impact on our living conditions like access to clean drinking water, toilet systems, antibiotics, etc. However, technology cann...