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Penn State team develops more environmentally friendly method for separating bitumen or oil from sands using ionic liquids

Green Car Congress

Separation of bitumen from a Canadian oil sand sample using an ionic liquid. A team of researchers at Penn State has developed a new, more environmentally friendly method of separating bitumen from oil sands utilizing ionic liquids (IL). Oil sands represent approximately two-thirds of the world’s estimated oil reserves.

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Opinion: Oil Megaprojects Won’t Stay On The Shelf For Long

Green Car Congress

One casualty of the oil price downturn could be the megaproject. For years, as conventional oil reserves depleted and became increasingly hard to find, oil companies ventured into far-flung locales to find new sources of production. The collapse of oil prices, however, could kill off the megaproject.

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Chevron leveraging information technology to optimize thermal production of heavy oil with increased recovery and reduced costs

Green Car Congress

Chevron’s focus on optimizing the thermal management of the Kern River field has resulted in a steady drop in the steam:oil ratio (barrels steam water per barrel oil), resulting in improved economics of the field even with slowly declining production. Data: California DOGGR. Click to enlarge. Source: Chevron. Click to enlarge.

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Carbon capture won’t clean up tar sands

Green Cars News

Carbon capture technology will not solve the climate change threat posed by the expansion of tar sands developments, a damning new report warns today. The production of tar sands oil -also know as oil sands- is a highly energy intensive process and emits on average three times more CO2 than conventional oil production.

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PHEV's and Water Consumption

Plug In Partners

grid, then your car is not very clean, nor is it water-free.” The number varies greatly, but the ConocoPhillips refinery in Billings, Montana processes 62,000 bbls of crude oil , or 2.6 That is 879 million gallons of crude oil per year. gallons of water per gallon of crude oil processed. million gallons per day.

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Surprising, Unsettling, Surreal: Roaming Through Saudi Arabia

Baua Electric

All across Saudi Arabia, I’d seen countless projects being built, from simple museums to high-end resorts. These were the early fruits of an $800 billion investment in the travel sector, itself part of a much larger effort, Vision 2030 , to remake the kingdom and reduce its economic dependence on oil.