Pacific Basin Heavy Oil Refining Capacity

The United States today is Canada’s largest customer for oil and refined oil products. However, this relationship may be strained due to physical, economic and political influences. Pipeline capacity is approaching its limits; Canadian oil is selling at substantive discounts to world market prices; and U.S. demand for crude oil and finished products (such as gasoline), has begun to flatten significantly relative to historical rates. Lower demand, combined with increased shale oil production, means U.S. demand for Canadian oil is expected to continue to decline. Under these circumstances, gaining access to new markets such as those in the Asia-Pacific region is becoming more and more important for the Canadian economy. However, expanding pipeline capacity to the Pacific via the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the planned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is only feasible when there is sufficient demand and processing capacity to support Canadian crude blends. Canadian heavy oil requires more refining and produces less valuable end products than other lighter and sweeter blends. Canadian producers must compete with lighter, sweeter oils from the Middle East, and elsewhere, for a place in the Pacific Basin refineries built to handle heavy crude blends. Canadian oil sands producers are currently expanding production capacity. Once complete, the Northern Gateway pipeline and the Trans Mountain expansion are expected to deliver an additional 500,000 to 1.1 million barrels a day to tankers on the Pacific coast. Through this survey of the capacity of Pacific Basin refineries, including existing and proposed facilities, we have concluded that there is sufficient technical capacity in the Pacific Basin to refine the additional Canadian volume; however, there may be some modifications required to certain refineries to allow them to process Western Canadian crude. Any additional capacity for Canadian oil would require refinery modifications or additional refineries, both of which are not expected, given the volume of lighter and more valuable crude from the Middle East finding its way to Pacific Basin markets. Consequently, any new refinery capacity is not likely to be dedicated to Canadian crude shipments. This places increasing importance on the need to enter into long-term contracts to supply Pacific Basin refineries, backed up by evidence of adequate transportation capacity. Canadians will have to show first, and quickly, that we are committed to building pipelines that will bring sufficient volumes of oil to the Pacific coast necessary to give the refiners the certainty they need to invest in infrastructure for refining Canadian oil. Access to this crucial market will depend critically on the outcome of the pipeline approval process, and also the cost to ship from Canada. If Canada does not approve of the Pacific coast pipeline expansions, or takes too long in doing so, it could find its crude unable to effectively penetrate the world’s most promising oil export market

Fast Large-Tip-Angle Multidimensional and Parallel RF Pulse Design in MRI

Large-tip-angle multidimensional radio-frequency (RF) pulse design is a difficult problem, due to the nonlinear response of magnetization to applied RF at large tip-angles. In parallel excitation, multidimensional RF pulse design is further complicated by the possibility for transmit field patterns to change between subjects, requiring pulses to be designed rapidly while a subject lies in the scanner. To accelerate pulse design, we introduce a fast version of the optimal control method for large-tip-angle parallel excitation. The new method is based on a novel approach to analytically linearizing the Bloch equation about a large-tip-angle RF pulse, which results in an approximate linear model for the perturbations created by adding a small-tip-angle pulse to a large-tip-angle pulse. The linear model can be evaluated rapidly using nonuniform fast Fourier transforms, and we apply it iteratively to produce a sequence of pulse updates that improve excitation accuracy. We achieve drastic reductions in design time and memory requirements compared to conventional optimal control, while producing pulses of similar accuracy. The new method can also compensate for nonidealities such as main field inhomogeneties.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86004/1/Fessler12.pd

Catching the Brass Ring: Oil Market Diversification Potential for Canada

This paper examines the nature and structure of the Canadian oil export market in the context of world prices for heavy crude oil and the potential price differential available to Canadian producers gaining access to new overseas markets. Success in this arena will allow Canada to reap incredible economic benefits. For example, the near term benefits for increased access to Gulf Coast markets after mid-continent bottlenecks are removed, are significant, representing nearly 10$US per barrel for Canadian producers. On the Pacific Coast, the world market is represented by growing capacity for heavy crude products in emerging Asian markets including Japan, Korea and China and existing heavy crude facilities in California and the west coast. Here, in the reference scenario for California and Asia the benefits are assumed to begin in 2020. The differential value range in California in 2020 is estimated at$7.20US per barrel and escalates to $8.77US by 2030. In Asia, the benefit range is estimated to grow from$11.15US per barrel in 2020 to $13.60US in 2030. Those higher prices for Canadian heavy oil would translate into significant increases in profits, jobs and government revenues. With better access and new pipeline capacity, oil producers will see more efficient access to international markets which can add up to$131 billion to Canada’s GDP between 2016 and 2030 in the reference scenario. This amounts to over $27 billion in federal, provincial and municipal tax receipts, along with an estimated 649,000 person-years of employment. Alberta will be the principal but not sole beneficiary from increased access to world market pricing. Most provinces and territories will realize fiscal and economic gains from the distribution and sale of products reflecting reduced costs and increased access to refineries for heavy oil. The key to this change is the elimination of current bottlenecks in transport and the expansion of a network of pipelines that can move Canadian crude oil to locations reflecting minimal discounts from world market prices. As this paper demonstrates with hard facts and figures, the rewards are too great to ignore

Additive angle method for fast large-tip-angle RF pulse design in parallel excitation

Current methods for parallel excitation RF pulse design are based on the small-tip-angle approximation, which provides a computationally efficient means of pulse calculation. In general, pulses designed with those methods are inaccurate when scaled to produce large-tip angles, and methods for large-tipangle pulse design are more computationally demanding. This paper introduces a fast iterative method for large-tip-angle parallel pulse design that is formulated as a small number of Bloch equation simulations and fast small-tip-angle pulse designs, the results of which add to produce large-tip-angle pulses. Simulations and a phantom experiment demonstrate that the method is effective in designingmultidimensional large-tip-angle pulses of high excitation accuracy, compared to pulses designed with small-tip-angle methods. Magn Reson Med 59:779–787, 2008. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58569/1/21510_ftp.pd

Finding character strengths through loss: an extension of Peterson and Seligman (2003)

People can experience positive changes even in the midst of adversity and loss. We investigated character strengths following three recent shooting tragedies. Using an Internet database of respondents to the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS), we compared responses from three groups of participants (N = 31,429) within close proximity of each event: those who completed it eight months prior to the event, and one month and two months after. Results suggested that for one of the events, participants who completed the VIA-IS after the event showed slightly different levels of self-reported character strengths compared to participants who completed the VIA-IS before the event, with some mean levels higher and others lower. The observed differences in character strengths were inconsistent across follow-up periods, and effect sizes were small (d values from –0.13 to 0.15). These findings raise questions about whether and how tragedies might catalyze differences in character strengths

Spectral-spatial pulse design for through-plane phase precompensatory slice selection in T 2 * -weighted functional MRI

T 2 * -weighted functional MR images suffer from signal loss artifacts caused by the magnetic susceptibility differences between air cavities and brain tissues. We propose a novel spectral-spatial pulse design that is slice-selective and capable of mitigating the signal loss. The two-dimensional spectral–spatial pulses create precompensatory phase variations that counteract through-plane dephasing, relying on the assumption that resonance frequency offset and through-plane field gradient are spatially correlated. The pulses can be precomputed before functional MRI experiments and used repeatedly for different slices in different subjects. Experiments with human subjects showed that the pulses were effective in slice selection and loss mitigation at different brain regions. Magn Reson Med 61:1137–1147, 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62134/1/21938_ftp.pd

Snap evaporation of droplets on smooth topographies

Droplet evaporation on solid surfaces is important in many applications including printing, micro-patterning and cooling. While seemingly simple, the configuration of evaporating droplets on solids is difficult to predict and control. This is because evaporation typically proceeds as a “stick-slip” sequence—a combination of pinning and de-pinning events dominated by static friction or “pinning”, caused by microscopic surface roughness. Here we show how smooth, pinning-free, solid surfaces of non-planar topography promote a different process called snap evaporation. During snap evaporation a droplet follows a reproducible sequence of configurations, consisting of a quasi-static phase-change controlled by mass diffusion interrupted by out-of-equilibrium snaps. Snaps are triggered by bifurcations of the equilibrium droplet shape mediated by the underlying non-planar solid. Because the evolution of droplets during snap evaporation is controlled by a smooth topography, and not by surface roughness, our ideas can inspire programmable surfaces that manage liquids in heat- and mass-transfer applications

Don’t Until the Final Verb Wait: Reinforcement Learning for Simultaneous Machine Translation

We introduce a reinforcement learning-based approach to simultaneous ma-chine translation—producing a trans-lation while receiving input words— between languages with drastically dif-ferent word orders: from verb-final lan-guages (e.g., German) to verb-medial languages (English). In traditional ma-chine translation, a translator must “wait ” for source material to appear be-fore translation begins. We remove this bottleneck by predicting the final verb in advance. We use reinforcement learn-ing to learn when to trust predictions about unseen, future portions of the sentence. We also introduce an evalua-tion metric to measure expeditiousness and quality. We show that our new translation model outperforms batch and monotone translation strategies.