662 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Geologic and Hydrologic Controls on Coalbed Methane: Sand Wash Basin, Colorado and Wyoming - April 1993
Large coal resources occur in the Upper Cretaceous Williams Fork Formation and lower Tertiary Fort Union Formation in the eastern part of the Sand Wash Basin. These coals are mainly subbituminous to high-volatile B bituminous and have average gas contents of less than 100 to 200 ft3/ton (<3.12 to 6.24 m3/t). Coalbed methane resources total xx Tcf (x.xx Tm3) and are xx.xx Tcf (xxx Bm3) at drilling depths of less than 6,000 ft (<1,830 m). More than 85 percent of them are in the Williams Fork. The basin's cumulative gas/water ratio is approximately 15 ft3/bbl (2.7 m3/m3). To date, low gas content and high water production have limited coalbed methane activity in the basin. Steep structural dip and coal distribution have restricted exploration to the eastern margins of the basin. Prospective Williams Fork and Fort Union coals, respectively, lie basinward in association with the Cedar Mountain fault system and westward along Cherokee Arch into the Powder Wash field area. High productivity requires that permeability, ground-water flow direction, coal distribution and rank, gas content, and structural grain be synergistically combined. That synergism explains prolific and marginal production in the San Juan and Sand Wash Basins, respectively. On the basis of a comparison between the basins, a basin-scale coalbed methane productivity model is proposed whose essential elements are: ground-water flow through thick coals of high rank, perpendicular to no-flow boundaries and conventional trapping along them.Bureau of Economic Geolog
Recommended from our members
Geologic and Hydrologic Controls on Coalbed Methane: Sand Wash Basin, Colorado and Wyoming
Geologic and hydrologic analysis of the Upper Cretaceous Mesaverde Group shows that the major controls on the production of coalbed methane are: structural configuration, coal occurrence, gas content, hydrodynamics, and water production. Steep structural dip (500 ft/mi) and coal occurrence limit economic exploration to the eastern and southeastern margins of the basin. Coal resources occur mainly in the lower Williams Fork Formation (upper Mesaverde) in the eastern part of the basin. Most coal beds are high-volatile C to B bituminous rank and have gas contents of less than 200 scf/ton. Moreover, Williams Fork coals do not extend westward to the area of highest thermal maturity. Thus, they could not serve as conduits for long-distance migration of gas. Regionally, groundwater flows westward from an eastern recharge area across an area of low thermal maturity up the coal-rank gradient. Consequently, only a relatively small volume of gas may be available to be swept basinward for conventional trapping. The most prospective areas lie basinward, northwest of Craig, Colorado, on the upflow, downward side of a major fault zone. Gas contents in some coal beds on the downthrown side of the fault exceed 400 scf/ton. The Mesaverde is a thick, regionally interconnected aquifer system of high transmissivity, yielding large volumes of water. Paradoxically, coalbed permeabilities of 10's to 1,000's of md may be too high for economic gas production. To date, high water production and low gas content at the basin margins have limited coalbed activity in the Sand Wash Basin. Major Tertiary coal resources occur in the lower part of the Paleocene Fort Union Formation.Bureau of Economic Geolog
Asymmetric Dark Matter May Alter the Evolution of Low-mass Stars and Brown Dwarfs
We study energy transport by asymmetric dark matter in the interiors of very
low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. Our motivation is to explore astrophysical
signatures of asymmetric dark matter, which otherwise may not be amenable to
conventional indirect dark matter searches. In viable models, the additional
cooling of very-low mass stellar cores can alter stellar properties. Asymmetric
dark matter with mass 4 < Mx/GeV < 10 and a spin-dependent (spin-independent)
cross sections of sigma \sim 10^{-37} cm^2 (sigma \sim 10^{-40} cm^2) can
increase the minimum mass of main sequence hydrogen burning, partly determining
whether or not the object is a star at all. Similar dark matter candidates
reduce the luminosities of low-mass stars and accelerate the cooling of brown
dwarfs. Such light dark matter is of particular interest given results from the
DAMA, CoGeNT, and CRESST dark matter searches. We discuss possibilities for
observing dark matter effects in stars in the solar neighborhood, globular
clusters, and, of particular promise, local dwarf galaxies, among other
environments, as well as exploiting these effects to constrain dark matter
properties.Comment: 6 Pages, 4 Figures. Accepted for Publication in Phys. Rev. D Rapid
Communication
The Flux Auto- and Cross-Correlation of the Lyman-alpha Forest. II. Modelling Anisotropies with Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations
The isotropy of the Lyman-alpha forest in real-space uniquely provides a
measurement of cosmic geometry at z > 2. The angular diameter distance for
which the correlation function along the line of sight and in the transverse
direction agree corresponds to the correct cosmological model. However, the
Lyman-alpha forest is observed in redshift-space where distortions due to
Hubble expansion, bulk flows, and thermal broadening introduce anisotropy.
Similarly, a spectrograph's line spread function affects the autocorrelation
and cross-correlation differently. In this the second paper of a series on
using the Lyman-alpha forest observed in pairs of QSOs for a new application of
the Alcock-Paczynski (AP) test, these anisotropies and related sources of
potential systematic error are investigated with cosmological hydrodynamic
simulations. Three prescriptions for galactic outflow were compared and found
to have only a marginal effect on the Lyman-alpha flux correlation (which
changed by at most 7% with use of the currently favored variable-momentum wind
model vs. no winds at all). An approximate solution for obtaining the zero-lag
cross-correlation corresponding to arbitrary spectral resolution directly from
the zero-lag cross-correlation computed at full-resolution (good to within 2%
at the scales of interest) is presented. Uncertainty in the observationally
determined mean flux decrement of the Lyman-alpha forest was found to be the
dominant source of systematic error; however, this is reduced significantly
when considering correlation ratios. We describe a simple scheme for
implementing our results, while mitigating systematic errors, in the context of
a future application of the AP test.Comment: 20 page
Recommended from our members
Coalbed Methane Potential of the Greater Green River, Piceance, Powder River and Raton Basins
Coalbed methane potential of the Greater Green River, Piceance, Powder River, and Raton Basins was evaluated in the context of geologic and hydrologic characteristics identified in the San Juan Basin, the nation's leading coalbed methane producing basin. The major comparative criteria were (1) coalbed methane resources, (2) geologic and hydrologic factors that predict areas of high gas producibility and high coalbed reservoir permeability, and (3) coalbed thermal maturity. These technical criteria were expanded to include structure, depositional systems, and database and then combined with economic criteria (production, industry activity, and pipeline availability) to evaluate the coalbed methane potential of the basins.
The Greater Green River and Piceance Basins have primary potential to make a significant near-term contribution to the nation's gas supply. These basins have large gas resources, high-rank coals, high gas contents, and established coalbed methane production. The Greater Green River Basin has numerous coalbed methane targets, good coal-seam permeability, and extensive hydrologic areas favorable for production. The Powder River and Raton Basins were judged to have secondary potential. Coal beds in the Powder River Basin are thermally immature and produce large volumes of water; the Raton Basin has a poor database and has no gas pipeline infrastructure. Low production and minimal industry activity further limit the near-term potential of the Raton Basin. However, if economic criteria are discounted and only major technical criteria are considered, the Greater Green River and Raton Basins are assigned primary potential. The Raton Basin's shallow, thermally mature coal beds of good permeability are attractive coalbed methane targets, but low coal-seam permeability limits the coalbed methane potential of the Piceance Basin.Bureau of Economic Geolog
Bending of Light by Gravity Waves
We describe the statistical properties of light rays propagating though a
random sea of gravity waves and compare with the case for scalar metric
perturbations from density inhomogeneities. For scalar fluctuations the
deflection angle grows as the square-root of the path length in the manner
of a random walk, and the rms displacement of a ray from the unperturbed
trajectory grows as . For gravity waves the situation is very
different. The mean square deflection angle remains finite and is dominated by
the effect of the metric fluctuations at the ends of the ray, and the mean
square displacement grows only as the logarithm of the path length. In terms of
power spectra, the displacement for scalar perturbations has while for gravity waves the trajectories of photons have which is a scale-invariant or `flicker-noise' process, and departures from
rectilinear motion are suppressed, relative to the scalar case, by a factor
where is the characteristic scale of the
metric fluctuations and is the path length. This result casts doubt on the
viability of some recent proposals for detecting or constraining the gravity
wave background by astronomical measurements.Comment: 14 pages, aastex, submitted to Astrophysical Journa
Galaxy Peculiar Velocities From Large-Scale Supernova Surveys as a Dark Energy Probe
Upcoming imaging surveys such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will
repeatedly scan large areas of sky and have the potential to yield
million-supernova catalogs. Type Ia supernovae are excellent standard candles
and will provide distance measures that suffice to detect mean pairwise
velocities of their host galaxies. We show that when combining these distance
measures with photometric redshifts for either the supernovae or their host
galaxies, the mean pairwise velocities of the host galaxies will provide a dark
energy probe which is competitive with other widely discussed methods. Adding
information from this test to type Ia supernova photometric luminosity
distances from the same experiment, plus the cosmic microwave background power
spectrum from the Planck satellite, improves the Dark Energy Task Force Figure
of Merit by a factor of 1.8. Pairwise velocity measurements require no
additional observational effort beyond that required to perform the traditional
supernova luminosity distance test, but may provide complementary constraints
on dark energy parameters and the nature of gravity. Incorporating additional
spectroscopic redshift follow-up observations could provide important dark
energy constraints from pairwise velocities alone. Mean pairwise velocities are
much less sensitive to systematic redshift errors than the luminosity distance
test or weak lensing techniques, and also are only mildly affected by
systematic evolution of supernova luminosity.Comment: 18 pages; 4 figures; 4 tables; replaced to match the accepted versio
Can simulations reproduce the observed temperature-mass relation for clusters of galaxies?
It has become increasingly apparent that traditional hydrodynamical
simulations of galaxy clusters are unable to reproduce the observed properties
of galaxy clusters, in particular overpredicting the mass corresponding to a
given cluster temperature. Such overestimation may lead to systematic errors in
results using galaxy clusters as cosmological probes, such as constraints on
the density perturbation normalization sigma_8. In this paper we demonstrate
that inclusion of additional gas physics, namely radiative cooling and a
possible preheating of gas prior to cluster formation, is able to bring the
temperature-mass relation in the innermost parts of clusters into good
agreement with recent determinations by Allen, Schmidt & Fabian using Chandra
data.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to MNRA
Science Objectives and Early Results of the DEEP2 Redshift Survey
The DEIMOS spectrograph has now been installed on the Keck-II telescope and
commissioning is nearly complete. The DEEP2 Redshift Survey, which will take
approximately 120 nights at the Keck Observatory over a three year period and
has been designed to utilize the power of DEIMOS, began in the summer of 2002.
The multiplexing power and high efficiency of DEIMOS enables us to target 1000
faint galaxies per clear night. Our goal is to gather high-quality spectra of
\~60,000 galaxies with z>0.75 in order to study the properties and large scale
clustering of galaxies at z ~ 1. The survey will be executed at high spectral
resolution, , allowing us to work
between the bright OH sky emission lines and to infer linewidths for many of
the target galaxies (for several thousand objects, we will obtain rotation
curves as well). The linewidth data will facilitate the execution of the
classical redshift-volume cosmological test, which can provide a precision
measurement of the equation of state of the Universe. This talk reviews the
project, summarizes our science goals and presents some early DEIMOS data.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, talk presented at SPIE conference, Aug. 200
- …