Safety analysis of plugging and abandonment of oil and gas wells in uncertain conditions with limited data

Well plugging and abandonment are necessitated to ensure safe closure of a non-producing offshore asset. Little or no condition monitoring is done after the abandonment operation, and data are often unavailable to analyze the risks of potential leakage. It is therefore essential to capture all inherent and evolving hazards associated with this activity before its implementation. The current probabilistic risk analysis approaches such as fault tree, event tree and bowtie though able to model potential leak scenarios; these approaches have limited capabilities to handle evolving well conditions and data unavailability. Many of the barriers of an abandoned well deteriorates over time and are dependent on external conditions, making it necessary to consider advanced approaches to model potential leakage risk. This paper presents a Bayesian network-based model for well plugging and abandonment. The proposed model able to handle evolving conditions of the barriers, their failure dependence and, also uncertainty in the data. The model uses advanced logic conditions such as Noisy-OR and leaky Noisy-OR to define the condition and data dependency. The proposed model is explained and tested on a case study from the Elgin platform's well plugging and abandonment failure

Spartan Daily, September 21, 1982

Volume 79, Issue 16https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6928/thumbnail.jp

Alcohol-Preferring Rats Show Goal Oriented Behaviour to Food Incentives but Are Neither Sign-Trackers Nor Impulsive.

Drug addiction is often associated with impulsivity and altered behavioural responses to both primary and conditioned rewards. Here we investigated whether selectively bred alcohol-preferring (P) and alcohol-nonpreferring (NP) rats show differential levels of impulsivity and conditioned behavioural responses to food incentives. P and NP rats were assessed for impulsivity in the 5-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT), a widely used translational task in humans and other animals, as well as Pavlovian conditioned approach to measure sign- and goal-tracking behaviour. Drug-naïve P and NP rats showed similar levels of impulsivity on the 5-CSRTT, assessed by the number of premature, anticipatory responses, even when the waiting interval to respond was increased. However, unlike NP rats, P rats were faster to enter the food magazine and spent more time in this area. In addition, P rats showed higher levels of goal-tracking responses than NP rats, as measured by the number of magazine nose-pokes during the presentation of a food conditioned stimulus. By contrast, NP showed higher levels of sign-tracking behaviour than P rats. Following a 4-week exposure to intermittent alcohol we confirmed that P rats had a marked preference for, and consumed more alcohol than, NP rats, but were not more impulsive when re-tested in the 5-CSRTT. These findings indicate that high alcohol preferring and drinking P rats are neither intrinsically impulsive nor do they exhibit impulsivity after exposure to alcohol. However, P rats do show increased goal-directed behaviour to food incentives and this may be associated with their strong preference for alcohol.There are errors in the Funding section. The correct funding information is as follows: The present study was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council Programme (MRC Ref: G1002231 awarded to BJE, JWD, TWR, Wellcome Trust Ref: 093875/Z/10/Z), and the R24 Alcohol Research Resource Award grant (R24 AA015512) from NIAAA. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from PLoS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.013101

Basic tastes and basic emotions: Basic problems and perspectives for a nonbasic solution

Contemporary behavioral and brain scientists consider the existence of so-called basic emotions in a similar way to the one described by Erickson for so-called basic tastes. Commenting on this analogy, I argue that similar basic problems are encountered in both perspectives, and I suggest a potential nonbasic solution that is tested in emotion research (i.e., the appraisal model of emotion

Moderately-rapid assessment of alkaline desiccation environmental systems

A moderately-rapid assessment tool was developed to analyze the waterless desiccation compost toilet investigated in a rural Mexican setting. Over 100 social factors were identified along with the applicable technical factors that influenced the low acceptability of the toilets. A 4-point rating scale was developed to increase the ability and speed of analyzing both the social and technical data. The treatment process was an alkaline-desiccation process with mean pH values of 8.2 ± sd 1.1 and water content of 18.3% ± sd 9.9, which resulted in mean fecal coliform values of 15.0 MPN/g ± sd 31.8, drastically lower than the 1000 MPN/g United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) limit. Alkalinity, not pH, was determined to be the limiting factor in some waste samples, resulting in the need to dilute the waste with local soils. Designs were developed to reduce the unnecessarily long detention times between 0.75 to 4.4 years and improve other features, especially additive use and waste handling. Solvita® test kits were used to assess compost characteristics. Modifications, made to kit procedures to enable their use, included adjusting pH values and extending the pre-test acclimation period. With low macro-nutrient concentrations, a mean carbon/nitrogen ratio of 14.0 ± sd 6.1, and a mean volatile solids value of 15.9 ± sd 6.9 indicative of low organic matter, the finished waste had limited agricultural value, however, the treatment process did efficiently remove nitrogen in many samples and eliminate the pathogens in all of them. Mean Specific Oxygen Uptake Rate (SOUR) values of 1.4 ± sd 1.1 mg O2 / gram total solids were substantially close with the USEPA standard of 1.5. The SOUR on a volatile solids basis was not applicable. A socially and technically useful ASH/VS (inorganic/organic solids) ratio was discovered with mean concentration values of 6.8 ± sd 4.2 with most values falling within an easily explainable socially-valuable ten-point scale. The introduction of two other dry batch composting toilets created a competitive situation in the community where comparative analysis was being performed with the preferred pour-flush water toilet. If water shortages continue, the desiccation toilet’s acceptability may increase again