Field life cycle

Introduction and Commercial Application This section provides an overview of the activities carried out at the various stages of field development. Each activity is driven by a business need related to that particular phase. The later sections of this manual will focus in some more detail on individual elements of the field life cycle. 

Introduction and commercial application Safety and the environment have become important elements of all parts of the field life cycle, and involve all of the technical and support functions in an oil company. The Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988 has resulted in a major change in the approach to management of safety of world-wide oil and gas exploration and production activities. Companies recognise that good safety and environmental management make economic sense and are essential to guaranteeing long term presence in the industry. 

At each stage of a field life cycle raw data has to be converted into information, but for the information to have value it must influence decision making and profitability. 

Volumetric estimates are required at all stages of the field life cycle. In many instances a first estimate of how big an accumulation could be is requested. If only a back of the envelope estimate is needed or if the data available is very sparse a quick look estimation can be made using field wide averages. 

This section will consider the role of appraisal in the field life cycle, the main sources uncertainty in the description of the reservoir, and the appraisal techniques used to reduce this uncertainty. The value of the appraisal activity will be compared with its cost to determine whether such activity is justified. 

Appraisal activity, if performed, is the step in the field life cycle between the discovery of a hydrocarbon accumulation and its development. The role of appraisal is to provide cost-effective information with which the subsequent decision can be made. Cost effective means that the value of the decision with the appraisal information is greater than the value of the decision without the information. If the appraisal activity does not add more value than its cost, then it is not worth doing. This can be represented by a simple flow diagram, in which the cost of appraisal is A, the profit (net present value) of the development with the appraisal information is (D2-A), and the profit of the development without the appraisal information is D1. 

As introduced in Section 14.2, bottlenecks in the process facilities can occur at many stages in a producing field life cycle. A process facility bottleneck is caused when any piece of equipment becomes overloaded and restricts throughput. In the early years of a development, production will often be restricted by the capacity of the processing facility to treat hydrocarbons. If the reservoir is performing better than expected it may pay to increase plant capacity. If, however, it is just a temporary production peak such a modification may not be worthwhile. 

It will be critical to update publications such as the Design Guide Book in the industrial ventilation field on a regular basis. Never stop the developing process study, develop, and update everything, taking into account life-cycle ecological issues. 

The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) represents a third international player in the field of LCA. In 1996, UNEP published an easy to read and user-friendly guide to LCA° and supported several international workshops since then, deahng with various topics in the context of LCA. The launch of the Life Cycle Initiative in 2002 within UNEP further emphasised its importance.°°... 

In the past decades, polymer materials have been continuously replacing more traditional materials such as paper, metal, glass, stone, wood, natural fibres and natural rubber in the fields of clothing industry, E E components, automotive materials, aeronautics, leisure, food packaging, sports goods, etc. Without the existence of suitable polymer materials progress in many of these areas would have been limited. Polymer materials are appreciated for their chemical, physical and economical qualities including low production cost, safety aspects and low environmental impact (cf. life-cycle analysis). 

Development of Integrated Systematic Engineering Approaches to Sustainable Resource Exploitation (e.g., life-cycle analysis, soft-systems analysis) in fields such as Mining, Forestry, and Agriculture,... 

This last outcome was the starting point for the work to be done during the second part of the project. At this point, the different work packages focused on their topics, that is, in environmental fate, toxicology, risk assessment, life cycle assessment, and socioeconomic issues. The objective was to apply the different methodologies related to these fields of knowledge to the selected substances in order to assess the potential risk that they can pose to the human health and the environment. 

In the first part of this book, different models related to the assessment of the potential risk posed by the chemical additives are presented. These models come from different fields of expertise toxicology, risk assessment, chemicals fate and exposure, life cycle assessment, economics, etc. The potential benefits of the different models as well as their drawbacks are analyzed in order to select some of them for the application to particular case studies. 

A parasite must reproduce to complete its life cycle successfully. In this sense, the ability of an H. glycines individual to parasitize a soybean plant is measured by reproduction. In general, resistant hosts do not permit the female nematode to develop to reproductive maturity. Parasitism is a qualitative trait that the individual nematode either does or does not possess. In addition, nematode populations may be described quantitatively by their level of reproduction on a given host plant. Field populations of H. glycines... 

All-in dyeing method, 9 177 Allinger force fields, 26 744, 745 All-in paste, 9 216 Allocation methods, in life cycle assessment, 24 815 Allomone, 24 473 Allo-ocimene, 24 490, 495 oxidation of, 24 491 Allo-ocimene diepoxide, 24 491 Allo-ocimene epoxide, 24 491 Allo-ocimenols, isomeric, 24 490 All-organic transistors, 22 222-223 D-Allose, 4 698... 

There is potential in the anti-HIV field. Polyoxometallates of the Keggin type bind to viral envelope sites on cell surfaces and interfere with virus adsorption. Metal-chelating macrocyclic bicyclam ligands are among the most potent inhibitors of HIV ever described, and there is considerable interest in the role of Zn proteins in the viral life cycle. 

In this chapter I will provide a brief historic perspective, outline the manufacturing drivers for process analysis, provide a high-level overview of process analytical instrumentation, describe the PA method development life cycle prior to implementation and highlight the common pitfalls and challenges within the PA field. I have taken a pragmatic approach herein as the many benefits of PA are realized when a suitable process instrument and method is successfully implemented within a routine manufacturing environment, which is most often a multifaceted endeavor. 

The relatively new field of industrial ecology provides a useful organizing framework for DEE (Lowe, 1993). Design for Environment (DEE) is the terminology for the third component of the LCA life-cycle improvement assessment. The principle of sustainable development suggests that companies or individuals should try both to minimize the consumption of virgin natural resources and to minimize the generation of waste material that has no productive use. 

---