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This article is adopted from Plant Services that I subscribed. It’s such an interesting article and trigger us to think more on how to effectively recover waste oil from waste water and other sources. I still remember when I work in the oil and gas field; and refinery, there are a lot of oil spilled, trapped and lost just like that, to underground etc. We need to improve and develop a more efficient and effective way to restore the precious oil.

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The unprecedented rise in world oil prices keeps both industry and consumers over a financial barrel, Abanaki Corp. is renewing its call for plants to recycle waste oil for heat or for resale to an authorized recycler. The owner and president of Abanaki, a producer of oil-skimming products, says recycling and reselling waste oil can take some of the sting out of today’s oil crisis.

“If there were not enough environmental reasons to resell or reuse oil already, there’s absolutely no reason you should not be reclaiming your oil,” says Abanaki’s Tom Hobson. “With oil at well over $100 a barrel and likely fluctuating for some time, the oil you can recycle from your own plant can be reused in an industrial heater or an authorized recycler will buy it from you.”

For some time, Hobson has been encouraging plants to recognize the financial advantages in turning waste oil into profit. With an oil skimmer, a company can collect up to 40 gallons per hour of oil or grease from wastewater. “Oil skimming cost-effectively reclaims oil from wastewater and, as heating bills climb, they can save energy costs by burning it,” Hobson says. “In fact, burning spent oil in the proper furnace can often deliver a higher Btu [British thermal unit] value than new oil.”

Because used oil usually has a thicker viscosity, it possesses more energy than #2 fuel oil and more than twice the energy value of LP gas or coal. Waste oils that can be burned for heat include almost any oil up to 50 S.A.E.: metal-cutting oils, lube oil, crankcase oil, transmission and hydraulic fluid, #1 and #2 diesel fuel, vegetable oils and grease.

Much to the surprise of many in industry, the process of a plant burning its own used oil gets good marks from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Hobson says. “The EPA supports the burning of used oil on site,” he explains, “because it prevents oil from entering the watershed and eliminates the risk of spills during transportation. A used-oil furnace is just as clean-burning as a standard furnace. Without question, there’s more money in your pocket if you can burn waste oil.”

Others are opting to sell their waste oil to authorized recyclers like David Charlton, CEO of Akron-based Rice Environmental Services (RES), who is a 15-year veteran in the collection and recycling of used oils, antifreeze and oil filters from commercial and industrial businesses. Like Abanaki, RES promotes a commitment to keeping the environment clean and to treating oil as a limited natural resource.

“It comes down to this — one, you can sell the clean, dry used oil or, two, you can recycle it,” says Charlton, whose company is part of the National Oil Recyclers Association (NORA). Established in 1985, NORA promotes “the primary mission of fighting the hazardous waste designation of used oil and [has] aided in the development of the EPA’s used oil management standards.”

“We’re completely on board to remove oil from water,” says Charlton, who pointed out that The Rice Companies not only recycle but also sell industrial and automotive lubricants. “It not just about reusing and recycling. It’s about rethinking how things are done. It’s the higher goal of sustainability.”

Whether waste oil is used for heating the plant or used for putting some dollars back into the plant’s operation through reselling or on-site recycling, it is a good resource, Abanki’s Hobson says. “If a plant has oil it’s not doing anything with, the oil may get discharged unintentionally in the plant. That’s a regulatory fine right there. Considering the alternative of reusing or reselling, the fine is a double-whammy. So why not profit from it?”

The “oil crisis” remains a front-page story and a top blogging topic, and Hobson believes more and more plant managers will look to recycling or reselling waste oil to help the bottom line. Only two years ago, an Abanaki-sponsored survey showed 78% of respondents were searching for ways to cut plant costs. About 35% said they would consider burning waste oils. Only 8% said that their plants already burned waste oil for heat.

Hobson says times are even tougher now: “Plant managers should not let the money hidden in their wastewater go to waste.”

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The article is from PlantServices.com. Please subscribe to their newsletter to get updated with the latest news related to plant services.

A novel catalyst technology could dramatically cut the production costs associated with compressed natural gas (CNG).

In the drive to reduce pollution, compressed natural gas (CNG) is becoming an increasingly popular option for transportation fuels. Now a new catalyst-based technology being developed by Oxford Catalysts will make it possible to produce CNG more economically.

Oxford Catalysts Group designs and develops specialty catalysts for the generation of clean fuels from both conventional fossil fuels and certain renewable sources such as biomass.

Its patent-pending technology is the result of almost 20 years of research at the Wolfson Catalysis Centre at the University of Oxford, headed by professor Malcolm Green. The company’s strategy is to license its catalysts for commercial application by entering into co-development partnerships with leading manufacturers, producers and suppliers in the petroleum, petrochemicals, fuel cells, biogas, steam applications and catalysis markets.

To this end, the company has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Thai state controlled oil and gas company PTT for the development of the new technology. PTT is Thailand’s only fully-integrated oil and gas company, with a leading position in exploration and production, transmission, refining, marketing and trading of petroleum and petrochemical products. Together with its affiliates, the company accounts for approximately 20 per cent of Thailand’s gross domestic product.

The first step in CNG production is to upgrade the natural gas raw material by removing impurities, such as mercury and sulphur. This is typically carried out via chemisorption, a process that removes pollutants by involving them in a chemical reaction.

The efficiency of the chemisorption process depends heavily on the composition of the catalyst, or more precisely, the chemisorbent. Lab-scale tests show a new proprietary chemisorbent from Oxford Catalysts has a greater capacity, or ability to take up more pollutant per unit volume, than existing chemisorbents. The key to the improved performance lies in the chemisorbent composition – the combination of the metals used in the chemisorbent.

The new chemisorbent will be tested by PTT in two commercial side-stream units, one located onshore, and one offshore. An industrial scale field trial is also planned. Meanwhile, Oxford Catalysts is working with a major catalyst company to scale up manufacture of the new catalyst for commercial deployment.

Derek Atkinson, business development director Oxford Catalysts, says: “The trick with developing chemisorbents lies in finding the right combination of metals to react with the pollutants you want to remove. There is a government-mandated need in Thailand to move to cleaner transportation fuels, specifically to the use of CNG. The use of this technology will make it possible to produce clean fuels such as CNG more economically. This, in turn, will help to reduce the environmental problems associated with the use of conventional fuels in crowded Thai cities.”

Chemisorption is a process that relies on a chemical reaction – rather than physical forces – to capture molecules onto the surface of a solid. In chemisorption reactions, the reaction takes place on the surface of a catalyst. When the catalyst surface is saturated, the catalyst is replaced.

The chemisorption catalyst being developed by Oxford Catalysts and tested by PTT is based on the use of a chemisorbent with a novel composition. Mercury and sulphur are pollutants that are present in many natural gas fields, and those in Thailand are no exception. This new chemisorbent has a greater capacity, or ability to take up more pollutants per unit volume, than existing materials, say the two companies.

Oxford Catalysts has two key platform technologies. The first is based on a novel class of catalysts made from metal carbides. Aside from their lower cost, these catalysts offer a number of advantages. For example, in some reactions metal loadings can be reduced. In others, the need for precious metal promoters can be eliminated, while still retaining or even exceeding the benefits of traditional catalysts. Applications of these metal-carbide catalysts include hydroprocessing and the conversion of natural gas, biogas or coal into sulphur-free diesel.

The second involves catalysts that can be used to produce steam at temperatures between 100ºC and 800ºC instantaneously, starting from room temperature, from a liquid fuel containing dilute hydrogen peroxide and either an alcohol, sugar, glycerol, starch or formic acid. Such instant steam could have important applications in a broad range of markets, from cleaning and disinfecting, to green energy in the form of motive power or electricity.

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Are you the type of person who wants to live a better life? Do you have the desire to improve the way you and your family live? Do you think that by being a better person in certain areas, you can be an idol for your kids and those around you? Is that important to you? If the answer is yes, you need to do something. You need to have the desire to grow progressively better and better. But the question is how?

Personally, I want to develop into a better person, a better husband, a better father and a better friend. I’m very grateful to have a good career and family. Those are the most important things for me. But, I also realize that my job (career) is actually to support my family which means to be a better provider for my wife and kids. I want my kids to be successful and I need to ensure the process begins from me. I want and need to be a balanced human being. I want to balance my life between what I need to do and what I want to do. Besides doing some monthly reflections of myself, I realize that I need to have some input to further enhance my inner side quality. I began searching for tapes and CD to stimulate and motivate myself. That’s when I found out about Subliminal Tapes and CD’s Self Improvement website.

From my extensive readings and participation in motivation seminars, I found out that lots of people are using subliminal CD or tapes to promote positive mental attitudes and enhance performance. In fact, university professors recommend subliminal learning to help students excel in their studies. Business people too rely on subliminal tapes or CD to increase motivation, relief stress and survive in the tough world.

Among self improvement program offered by Subliminal Self Improvements are breaking bad habits, freedom from fears, stress management, weight loss (my wife is very interested with this one), brain power, romance (and she likes this one too…), and many others. If you believe, you definitely can do it with the help of subliminal tapes and CD. It definitely helped me develop my self confidence and stage fright.

In this modern era, thanks to the technology advancement, we have more options. If you don’t favour tapes or CD, subliminal mp3 is another fantastic easy option which comes in very handy. Yes, they are also available in mp3 format and you can download them inside your mp3 player or ipod. Isn’t that cool?

Subliminal Self improvements ensure the highest quality of their products and offer no questions asked 1-year money back guarantee (but it is not valid with custom made subliminal tapes or MP3s). This simply means you have time to make sure you’re seeing results. You certainly have nothing to lose but a lot to gain. The price is surprisingly very affordable compared to other self improvement help program. It’s undeniably an incredible offer to be one step a better person.

Communication skills are an essential component in every organization. People in organization spend up to 75% of their time communicating with one another; whether it is at the interpersonal, inter-group, intra-group, organizational, or external levels. Poor communication skills can lead to poor public image, misunderstandings, mistakes, loss of productivity and can affect the morale and performance for the company.

By practicing good business communication skills, your employees and organization will perform better because everyone will know what is expected of them and what it takes to communicate effectively. We need to have a program that aims to help individuals to learn how to communicate clearly, avoid jumping to conclusions, seek clarification and avoid making assumptions that distorts the information received. They will know how to create the positive impact required to gain the confidence of their subordinates, bosses, customers and suppliers.

Such program can be designed to meet the needs of a highly competitive business environment, by equipping its personnel with the practical know-how and skills to communicate more effectively – to enable them to meet the challenges posed by competition and external factors.

Communication and interpersonal skills is the initial process to possess the ultimate power of influencing people

Getting people to do what you want/need them to do can be the most difficult task faced by leaders, managers, CEOs, or anyone in this situation. How do you influence people successfully? Do you have the skills in influencing them? What type of “secret weapon” do you have? Do you count on the power of your position, or do you believe that good people should not have been told what to do? That’s why, before we move to the next stage which is the ultimate power of influencing people, we need to establish our communication and interpersonal skills.

When I was at my secondary school, I’m very poor in this so called interpersonal skills. I’m even worse when it comes to public speaking or open presentation. However, I trained myself very hard. At university level, I joined few society and practiced tested my capability. Well, it was still very poor. However, 7 years after graduating, I work and had a presentation in front of about 200 students. Without realizing it, I found myself quite comfortable speaking in front of a massive crowd. I’m truly delighted and happy with that. I believe I’m now capable of speaking and giving speech in front of a crowd. I can influence my audience (i think so). It all came from training and believing.

As for conclusion, train yourself. Trust and believe in yourself…

Feeling like refinancing your home loan? Or perhaps, just checking out the market? Well, don’t look far. Everything is efficient and effective with GetSmart – the leading online financial marketplace. They make your live easy by just filling up a two-minute form which consists of 4 short pages and soon matches you with up to five high quality Lenders. You don’t need to submit your social security number, credit card and the wonderful part is everything is free. No obligation and no worries. Everything will be presented at the comfort of your home.

At GetSmart, you can do more than just analyzing and selecting your home loans. You can compare various available home loans easily, learn more on home loans at the loan resources page, and calculate your own mortgages or refinances using their calculator. Besides that, other types of loans such as student loans, auto loans, commercial loans and home improvement loans are also offered.

If you are a first time home buyer, don’t worry. GetSmart provide complete information to equip you with the knowledge to purchase your dream home. You can even shop or survey a house to buy at the real estate section. You can search homes for sale, real estate and realtors. Within a very short period of time, you can definitely find the correct house and the best home loan offered by shortlisted Lenders.

The website is clear, simple, very well designed and compact with all vital information that a home buyer requires. I love it and I know you should to as well. Try it out.

It was a very mentally tiring day for me after reading the Fluid Mechanics notes - for my lecture preparation next week. I then checked on the internet and stumbled upon this site (from Johns Hopkins Magazine) - Green Ideas, It Might Just Work. There were several very interesting articles but I thing I better share a good one here. The title was Lights Out, Equipment Off. It was basically a research conducted by a group of student to find out why the electricity consumed by their university was too much. Too much power consumptions leads to too much CO2 released to the air. Well, instead of me narrating the story, it’s better for you guys to check out the article (as bellow). Credit to the original author: Siobhan Paganelli, A&S ‘08. Illustrations by Roger Chouinard.

LIGHTS OUT, EQUIPMENT OFF

Kathryn Berndtson, a master of health science candidate in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently spent a lot of time trying to answer some questions. How did the school consume enough electricity to be responsible for 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions last year? How could so many educated, socially aware faculty, staff, and students be so excessive in their energy consumption?

Her quest began when she and three other Bloomberg students — Julia White, Sean Baird, and Becky Stepnitz — did a case study for a two-semester course combining ethnographic field work and qualitative data analysis. The team was free to choose its subject. The students wanted to do something related to the environment and promoting responsible energy consumption. For her part of the project, Berndtson decided to examine why the Bloomberg School used so much power. Over eight weeks, the team conducted focus groups and interviews, observed lab work, and dug through the school’s archives. Berndtson spoke with lab-science students, staff, and faculty to learn how their habits and perceptions affected their energy use. The results, she hoped, would “offer insight into barriers to energy efficiency.”

Data from focus groups and interviews led her to observe a fundamental conflict between doing science and conserving energy. One major drain, she found, was the electricity used to heat, cool, and light the school’s building 24 hours a day, every day of the year. The school does not set lab hours; students and researchers can come in and work whenever they want. Security staff, too, work round-the-clock. Likewise, many of the lab’s appliances — freezers, baths, insectaries, other lab tools — are always on. Some, like freezers and insectaries, have to run constantly. Others, like the water baths used to heat or cool beakers containing samples, do not but are turned on and off frequently and are rarely unplugged. Berndtson and her group also collected data that suggest the school errs on the side of caution when it categorizes almost all of its trash as biohazard waste, which means a lengthier, energy-consuming disposal process.

Students interviewed knew they weren’t using energy efficiently, says Berndtson, but felt it was a necessary evil, an unavoidable consequence of science. “I don’t think the demand [for 24-hour access] is huge,” one administrator told her, but added that limiting access wasn’t an option. Some experiments require constant attention, and students like having the freedom to work anytime. “You never know when you’re going to use [an appliance],” one student said. “So it might as well be warmed up and ready, because you don’t want to wait. It throws off your whole schedule.” Berndtson found that first-year PhD students preferred to use equipment after hours, when there was no need to compete with post-doctoral fellows. In her report, Berndtson wrote, “Repeatedly, participants stated that convenience was more important to them than saving energy — even if 24-hour access was not always needed to guarantee scientific outcomes, participants enjoyed the flexibility in scheduling that it allowed them.”

Berndtson noted the divergence of attitudes in students’ personal and academic lives. They reported conserving energy at home, but never at the lab. Faculty, too, admitted to conserving less than they could. “We all talk about conservation,” said one professor. “But at the end of a faculty meeting, everyone puts their garbage [including recyclables] right in the trash can.”

In 2007, the Bloomberg School replaced 30,000 incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lamps. That action alone resulted in a 2 percent to 3 percent reduction, equivalent to 890 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to an unpublished audit by the Bloomberg School’s Center for a Livable Future. But the next steps, says Berndtson, will be much more difficult, requiring behavioral changes by students and faculty.

“We have great aspirations,” said a support services administrator quoted in Berndtson’s report. “But when you start targeting student or faculty time, you need to go for small wins.” Mandating set hours or temperatures in the building, the administrator said, would risk loss of students and faculty who value constant access to labs and other amenities. What’s more, the Bloomberg School accounts for only 7 percent of the total energy consumed by the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. This limits its influence on decisions made by the LLC that buys power for JHMI.

Katherine Fritz, adjunct assistant professor in Bloomberg’s Department of International Health, was one of the faculty members guiding the project (the other was Lori Leonard, associate professor in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society). Fritz says the group’s research could be expanded to collect enough data to influence Hopkins policies. The study, she says, reflects “a burgeoning interest among students in the links between health, public health, and sustainability.” Fritz finds it gratifying to see students making connections between the environment and public health. “We encourage it, for sure,” she says. “But the students are leading the way.”

When she returned from summer travels, Berndtson planned to share the findings with the school’s environmental stewardship committee. She hopes to trigger a new study that would articulate the long-term financial benefits of greater energy efficiency in Bloomberg’s labs. “I think if people actually had those numbers in their hands,” she says, “they might just do something.”

Siobhan Paganelli, A&S ‘08, was Johns Hopkins Magazine’s spring 2008 Corbin Gwaltney Fellow.

NASA has created a new > Low-Temperature Oxidation Catalysts Catalytic Converter. Check out the following short video explaining their new technology.

This is an article adopted from EngineerLive.com which I found interesting as my research group was recently discussing on the possibility of using Catalytic Plasma Reactor to minimize the problem of methane flaring. The original article (below) referred to a diagram which cannot be included in this post because it is too small… I tried to click and extract the photo, but I just can’t do it. I hope the photo can be viewed in a larger version later to provide us better comprehension on the catalyst and zeolite arrangement. OK, enough about that, check on the article below… You can also register with EngineerLive.com to be updated with various up to date engineering news.

The organisations involved are the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) in Dalian, and China’s Institute of Coal Chemistry.
All three organisations are internationally recognised for research in developing improved technologies for safe and clean production of energy from coal and have mutual interests in:

o High temperature chemistry and diagnostics related to coal gasification.
o Functional sorbents design and development of syngas separations.
o Catalysis for hydrocarbon synthesis and conversions.

The three partner institutions have complementary research programmes without a lot of duplication. Where there are overlaps in currently funded projects, the teams initiate joint projects with each organisation using resources from their individual government funding agencies.
“With demand for energy – both electricity and transportation fuels – increasing, despite efficiency gains, coal usage is going to increase in both countries,” said Mike Davis, associate laboratory director for energy science and technology at PNNL. “Our challenge, on the research side, is to make it happen cleanly and economically. Together, I believe we can make important strides in this effort.”
“This is a unique opportunity to design and test new processes – such as carbon dioxide capture – that will reduce significantly the environmental impacts of coal usage,” said Doug Ray, associate laboratory director for fundamental science at PNNL.
Initially, the consortium is collaborating on air separation, coal gasification, cleanup and separation, and water gas shift reactions in the gas stream, hydrocarbon synthesis and carbon dioxide capture and utilisation.
However, the ICFCE’s first breakthrough has come with gas flaring. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, about 400m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent is released this way every year.

In new work, researchers have identified the structure of a catalytic material that can turn methane into a safe and easy-to-transport liquid. The insight lays the foundation for converting excess methane into a variety of useful fuels and chemicals.
“There’s a big interest in doing something with this ‘stranded’ methane other than flaring it off,” said PNNL chemist Chuck Peden. “An important thing researchers have struggled with is determining the structure of the active catalyst.’
That catalyst – molybdenum oxide sitting on a zeolite mineral – converts methane gas into the more tractable liquid benzene (Fig.1). But the process is not yet commercially viable. Scientists do not understand enough about the molecular details to improve the catalyst. Now, researchers at PNNL and the DICP have worked out some of the details that will help researchers zoom in on an efficient catalyst.
They reported their results 26th March in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. This work is the first publication to come out of the ICFCE.
To get these results, the chemists – led by Peden at PNNL and Xinhe Bao at DICP – used the world’s largest instrument of its kind – a 900-megahertz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. The NMR is armed with one of the strongest magnets constructed and can be outfitted to investigate solid samples, a step above its smaller cousins.
The combination of molybdenum oxide and a zeolite mineral had been shown in 1993 to convert methane, but the catalyst has been difficult to analyse. Researchers know that the zeolite anchors molybdenum oxide in place so methane and molybdenum oxide can react chemically, either on or in the zeolite channels. But no one could tell which comprised the reactive form: a small nugget of one or two molecules, or a larger cluster of many molybdenum oxide molecules.
“This uncertainty has led to a controversy in the scientific literature about the active phase and reaction mechanism of methane activation on these promising catalyst materials,” said DICP’s Bao.
Enter the world’s largest NMR. The technological problem lay in the molybdenum oxide itself. To study this particular oxide with NMR, the chemists needed to pick up the signal from one variant of molybdenum, 95Mo; the ultra-high field of the NMR, housed at the DOE’s environmental molecular sciences laboratory on the PNNL campus, allowed them to do so.
“The higher magnetic field improves the signal to noise,” said Peden. “And its large sample volume allowed us to put enough catalyst into the spectrometer to overcome the poor sensitivity of 95MoNMR.”

The researchers painstakingly prepared catalysts with increasing concentrations of molybdenum in the zeolite scaffold and focused the 900MHzNMR on the samples. The data revealed two different forms of the catalyst, as expected. One form contained the smaller nugget and the other form comprised the much larger clusters. When the concentration of molybdenum rose, more of these large clusters formed.
Then the team added methane and measured how much got converted into benzene by the catalysts. They found that when more smaller nuggets were present, more benzene was made, indicating the variety of one or two molybdenum oxide molecules was the reactive one.
Now, said Peden, the challenge is to design and produce the active form of the catalyst that could be used for large-scale benzene production, research that Bao and his group are already working on.
“We need to figure out how to get that structure and keep it that way,” concluded Bao.