Finding Data Should be Easier than Finding Oil

The competitiveness of modern enterprises heavily depends on their ability to make the right business decisions by relying on efficient and timely analysis of the right business critical data. In large and data intensive companies such as Equinor, a Norwegian multinational oil and gas company with more than 20,000 employees, gathering such data is not a trivial task due to the growing size and complexity of corporate information sources. As a result, the data gathering task is often the most time-consuming part of the decision making process, in particular when it comes to the work processes of Equinor's exploration geologists that should find in a timely manner new exploitable accumulations of oil or gas in given areas by analysing data about these areas. In this work we present our experience in addressing this data challenge tast at Equinor. We have developed and deployed at Equinor a semantic data access system that relies on the Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) approach. Our system is based on our solid theoretical contributions and has been extensively evaluated at Equinor

Energy Alarmism: The Myths That Make Americans Worry about Oil

Many Americans have lost confidence in their country's "energy security" over the past several years. Because the United States is a net oil importer, and a substantial one at that, concerns about energy security naturally raise foreign policy questions. Some foreign policy analysts fear that dwindling global oil reserves are increasingly concentrated in politically unstable regions, and they call for increased U.S. efforts to stabilize -- or, alternatively, democratize -- the politically tumultuous oil-producing regions. Others allege that China is pursuing a strategy to "lock up" the world's remaining oil supplies through long-term purchase agreements and aggressive diplomacy, so they counsel that the United States outmaneuver Beijing in the "geopolitics of oil." Finally, many analysts suggest that even the "normal" political disruptions that occasionally occur in oil-producing regions (e.g., occasional wars and revolutions) hurt Americans by disrupting supply and creating price spikes. U.S. military forces, those analysts claim, are needed to enhance peace and stability in crucial oil-producing regions, particularly the Persian Gulf. Each of those fears about oil supplies is exaggerated, and none should be a focus of U.S. foreign or military policy. "Peak oil" predictions about the impending decline in global rates of oil production are based on scant evidence and dubious models of how the oil market responds to scarcity. In fact, even though oil supplies will increasingly come from unstable regions, investment to reduce the costs of finding and extracting oil is a better response to that political instability than trying to fix the political problems of faraway countries. Furthermore, Chinese efforts to lock up supplies with long-term contracts will at worst be economically neutral for the United States and may even be advantageous. The main danger stemming from China's energy policy is that current U.S. fears may become a self-fulfilling prophecy of Sino-U.S. conflict. Finally, political instability in the Persian Gulf poses surprisingly few energy security dangers, and U.S. military presence there actually exacerbates problems rather than helps to solve them. Our overarching message is simply that market forces, modified by the cartel behavior of OPEC, determine most of the key factors that affect oil supply and prices. The United States does not need to be militarily active or confrontational to allow the oil market to function, to allow oil to get to consumers, or to ensure access in coming decades

Algae Biofuel Triacylglyceride Transesterification Optimization

Algae biofuels may hold the key to solving the problem of fossil fuel consumption by being comparable in content, renewable, and carbon-neutral. Many biofuel researchers and corporations have undertaken to increase the production rate or capacity of triacylglycerides (TAG), the fat precursor to biodiesel fuel produced by algae, in algae cultures and published articles documenting their findings. This research is devoted to evaluating the effect of water that may be present in samples on the conversion efficiency of TAG into fatty acid methyl esters (FAME), commonly referred to as biodiesel. Therefore, that efficiency was studied to find the water content which optimizes the yield and determine if further drying of algae was necessary as an additional step in sample preparation. The results showed that the water content typically present in lyophilized algae samples is not sufficient to appreciably inhibit the reaction efficiency and necessitate extensive drying as a sample preparation step prior to transesterification