Energy, Resources and the Environment

ERE Division Outstanding Young Scientist Award: who would you nominate?

ERE Matters May 25, 2015

Every year the EGU rewards outstanding young or early career scientists with the Arne Richter Outstanding Young Scientist Award (OYSA), or one of the Division Outstanding Young Scientist Awards. These awards are granted for an outstanding research contribution in the Earth, planetary and space sciences, and are intended to identify the awardees as role models for the next generation of young scientists.

If you know an outstanding YS, who has made a significant contribution to Energy, Resources and the Environment, please consider nominating them for the ERE Division OYSA! 🙂

For more information on the awards and medals awarded by EGU, check here. Please be aware that all nominations must be submitted online by the 15th of June! Go to the EGU website for a checklist on what to do before you submit.

Award Ceremony at the EGU GA 2015. Will you be on stage next year?

The Sound of Climate Change: ‘Planetary Bands, Warming World’ by Daniel Crawford

ERE Matters May 22, 2015

For scientists, it can often be challenging to convert all our numbers and figures into something that is understandable for laymen. How can you make all these findings and knowledge we have tangible, speaking to people’s emotions? Daniel Crawford from the University of Minnesota translated NASA‘s climate change data to a musical composition. Each of the four zones in the Northern Hemisphere, the equator, midlatitudes, high latitides and arctic, are represented by an instrument, while the relative temperature shift in each zone is represented by the pitch range of the instrument.

Read the whole article on EOS. Or watch the video below 🙂

https://vimeo.com/127083533

The Late Holocene Fever by Christian Massari (Winner in the EGU Photo Contest 2015; taken from ImagGeo)

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Doesn’t the music of the world sound beautiful and scary at the same time? I can’t help but noticing the increasing pitch of the arctic, which means that temperature changes in this already delicate area are increasing faster than in any of the other regions…

Are we going to curb the trend? Tell us if you are working on any climate related research, or what your thoughts are on the issue of climate change.

Words on Wednesday: Flow-through experiments on water–rock interactions in a sandstone caused by CO2 injection at pressures and temperatures mimicking reservoir conditions

ERE Matters May 20, 2015

Words on Wednesday aims at promoting interesting/fun/exciting publications on topics related to Energy, Resources and the Environment. If you would like to be featured on WoW, please send us a link of the paper, or your own post, at ERE.Matters@gmail.com.

This week, we would like to share with you the latest manuscript of Farhana Huq, who was our guest-blogger on Monday! 🙂

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Huq, F., S.B. Haderlein, O.A. Cirpka, M. Nowak, P. Blum, P. Grathwohl, 2015. Flow-through experiments on water–rock interactions in a sandstone caused by CO2 injection at pressures and temperatures mimicking reservoir conditions. Applied Geochemistry, v58, 136–146.

Highlights:

Altmark sandstone showed CO₂-induced fluid–rock interactions under in-situ conditions.
Dissolution of anhydrite and calcite cements was inferred from fluid analysis.
Sample permeability increased by a factor 2.

Abstract:

Flow-through experiments were performed in a newly designed experimental setup to study the water–rock interactions caused by CO₂ injection in sandstones obtained from the Altmark natural gas reservoir under the simulated reservoir conditions of 125°C and 50 bar CO₂ partial pressure. Two different sets of experiments were conducted using CO₂-saturated millipore water and CO₂-saturated brine (41.62 g L^-1 NaCl and 31.98 g L^-1 CaCl₂·2H₂O), mimicking the chemical composition of the reservoir formation water. The major components in the sandstone were quartz (clasts + cement), feldspars, clay minerals (illite and chlorite), and cements of carbonates and anhydrite. Fluid analysis suggested the predominant dissolution of anhydrite causing increased concentrations of calcium and sulfate at early time periods at non-equilibrium geochemical conditions. The Ca/SO₄ molar ratio (>1) indicated the concurrent dissolution of both calcite and anhydrite. Dissolution of feldspar and minor amounts of clay (chlorite) was also evident during the flow-through experiments. The permeability of the sample increased by a factor of two mostly due to the dissolution of rock cements during brine injection. Geochemical modeling suggests calcite dissolution as the major buffering process in the system. The results may in future studies be used for numerical simulations predicting CO₂ storage during injection in sandstone reservoirs.

Reaction vessel used in the CO2/brine/rock reaction experiments on the Altmark sandstone – courtesy Farhana Huq

In NY Times: Butting Heads in the Himalayas

ERE Matters May 19, 2015

The environment we live in is shaped by many factors. It is not just how we use the land, resources and energy that is provided to us, there may also be factors that are simply out of our control. In recent weeks, this has become painfully clear in the area near Kathmandu, Nepal. Two devastating earthquakes have taken place within only a short amount of time, leaving a trail of destruction. We know that these earthquakes are the result of India moving towards the Eurasian continent, but what is driving India to move so fast, ploughing though the Earth’s crust like a bulldozer? Just like India is butting heads with Eurasia in the Himalayas, scienstists seem to be butting heads over the Himalayas, with multiple hypotheses trying to explain the complicated plate tectonics in the area…

Want to know more? Read all about it in this article in the New York Times! 🙂

Sunset from 20,000 feet on Mount Ama Dablam, Nepal – photo by Suzanne Imber (taken from ImagGeo)