Great SCO2T! Rapid tool for carbon sequestration science, engineering, and economics

CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology is likely to be widely deployed in coming decades in response to major climate and economics drivers: CCS is part of every clean energy pathway that limits global warming to 2C or less and receives significant CO2 tax credits in the United States. These drivers are likely to stimulate capture, transport, and storage of hundreds of millions or billions of tonnes of CO2 annually. A key part of the CCS puzzle will be identifying and characterizing suitable storage sites for vast amounts of CO2. We introduce a new software tool called SCO2T (Sequestration of CO2 Tool, pronounced "Scott") to rapidly characterizing saline storage reservoirs. The tool is designed to rapidly screen hundreds of thousands of reservoirs, perform sensitivity and uncertainty analyses, and link sequestration engineering (injection rates, reservoir capacities, plume dimensions) to sequestration economics (costs constructed from around 70 separate economic inputs). We describe the novel science developments supporting SCO2T including a new approach to estimating CO2 injection rates and CO2 plume dimensions as well as key advances linking sequestration engineering with economics. Next, we perform a sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of geology combinations (including formation depth, thickness, permeability, porosity, and temperature) to understand the impact on carbon sequestration. Through the sensitivity analysis we show that increasing depth and permeability both can lead to increased CO2 injection rates, increased storage potential, and reduced costs, while increasing porosity reduces costs without impacting the injection rate (CO2 is injected at a constant pressure in all cases) by increasing the reservoir capacity.Comment: CO2 capture and storage; carbon sequestration; reduced-order modeling; climate change; economic

The seven servants of Ham: Labourer’s letters from Wellington in the New Zealand Journal, 1840-1845

Several years ago David Fitzpatrick noted that ‘the materials of family history’ had assumed increasing importance in studies of immigration. ‘[O]ld photographs, diaries and letters’, combined with genealogical methods, allow historians to ‘reconstitute the personal stories’ of migrants. A number of New Zealand historians have done just that. Raewyn Dalziel’s research on 1840s immigrants to New Plymouth involved genealogical techniques. Rollo Arnold’s Farthest Promised Land traced ‘ordinary people whose family traditions are rooted in the English villages’. More recently, Jock Phillips and Terry Hearn have drawn on ‘family histories collected by members of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists’. Of the many forms of private documents used in studies of colonial immigration, used letters have perhaps proved of greatest interest. In 1972 Charlotte Erickson’s book of English–American correspondence demonstrated the contribution letters could make to studies of ‘the process of migration and the impact of this experience upon the migrant himself’. Angela McCarthy described letters as a fascinating ‘source for exploring New Zealand history’ and used them to draw attention to ‘the critical importance of kin and neighbourhood connections’ of Irish migrants to New Zealand. Similarly, Frances Porter and Charlotte Macdonald have used extracts from early immigrants’ letters to identify women’s experiences of ‘unsettlement’ and ‘destabilisation’

‘Emigrants of the labouring classes’: Capital, labour and learning in Wellington, 1840-45

Questions of space and place are of increasing interest to educational researchers. A recent synopsis of “educational geography” identifies Henri Lefebvre as a particularly “overarching presence in the educational appropriation of spatial theories with many researchers referring to his work on perceived, conceived and lived space” (Gulson and Symes, 2007, p.101). Physical, or perceived, space is that of everyday embodied “spatial practices” in everyday life: “social practice, the body, the use of the hands, the practical basis of the perception of the outside world” (Lefebvre, 1974, p.38). Abstract, or conceived, space, a product of capitalism, “includes the ‘world’ of commodities, its ‘logical’ and its worldwide strategies; as well as the power of money and that of the political state” (Lefebvre, 1974, p.53). “Representations of space” are the charts, texts or maps of these rationally determined enclosures, including those of “cartographers, urban planners or property speculators” (Shields, 2004, p. 210). Enacting technologies of domination, these introduce “a new form into a pre-existing space – generally a rectilinear or rectangular form such as a meshwork or chequerwork” (Lefebvre, 1974, p.139). Lived, or social, space includes the realm of the imagination that “has been kept alive and acceptable by the arts and literature. This ‘third space’ not only transcends but also has the power to refigure the balance of popular ‘perceived space’ and official ‘conceived space’” (Shields, 2004, p. 210). The artistic and other expressions of “lived space” are referred to as “representational spaces.” In capitalist societies, Lefbvre argued, the abstract appropriations of “conceived space”, and textual representations of this space, gain ascendency

Mentoring and teaching in academic settings: Professional and cultural identities from one Pākehā’s perspective

When invited to respond to the paper on “Mentoring Māori in a Pākehā framework” by Hook, Waaka and Raumati (2007), I hesitated. Mentoring was not a term I had previously used in my professional thinking or academic writing: unlike Barbara Grant (Ratima & Grant, 2007), I had not been involved in formal mentoring programmes or immersed myself in the mentoring literature. As a Pākehā, I was not qualified to evaluate the authors’ definition of a Māori framework. At first glance, the target paper’s focus seemed to be on mentoring in commercial, rather than academic workplaces. My experience had been as a teacher, the last 30 years having been in a university School of Education. I was persuaded to undertake this commentary on the grounds that academic work involves nurturing, advising and supporting younger or less experienced colleagues, as well as students – tasks identified as mentoring in the Hook et al. paper. The following comments are informed by my everyday practices as teacher, thesis supervisor and researcher, and by my former management roles as an assistant dean of graduate studies and head of department. My angle of vision and conceptual resources are those of a (Pākehā and feminist) sociologist of education

A thesis in the house: family matters.

This paper is taken from a wider study of the experience of researching and writing a thesis. My interviews with 57 PhD graduates in Education included many accounts of how women and men managed their time and organised space. Where, and when, do thesis students read, think, and write? They spoke of struggles to `make time', `clear space,' or `create a private place.' How did they reconcile the spatial, temporal, and relational demands - simultaneous and competing - of thesis research and domestic life? How did they handle the physical and emotional stresses of `mapping' the thesis into their everyday lives? The interface between domestic life and intellectual production is an issue that has received little attention in educational scholarship. I draw on geographical, as well as educational, theorists to Upproach this question

Critical Psychiatry

Critical psychiatry appraises and comments upon psychiatric services as they are usually provided. This article, prompted by the publication of a recent book, considers the place of critical psychiatry historically and in the context of contemporary mental health care and treatment

Becoming PBRF-able: Research assessment and education in New Zealand

It seems ironic that, designed as they are to quantify, evaluate and reward the research quantum of academic institutions, departments and individuals, research assessment exercises have themselves become objects of their research and critique. As many in this volume and elsewhere attest, the impact of research assessment runs deeper than mere measurement of “what is already there”: such processes are productive, or formative (Henkel, 2005, McNay, 2003; Sikes, 2006). Of course bringing about change is intended in the sense of increasing research quantity, enhancing its quality, etc. However, there are suggestions that by changing the conditions of knowledge production, research assessment exercises may also alter the shape and direction of disciplines by diverting and channelling researchers’ intellectual attention and political engagement, influencing what they study, how they do it, and how they report and write (Beck and Yong, 2005; Bernstein, 2000)

"I my own professor": Ashton-Warner as New Zealand educational theorist, 1940-60.

The invitation to contribute to this volume addressed me as a New Zealander who had written about how Sylvia Ashton-Warner's fantasies, theories, imagery, and life-history narratives threaded their way through my own. I had written of my youthful encounters with her work in Educating Feminists (Middleton 1993), in which I looked back on reading Spinster in 1960 at age thirteen and reflected on my teenage dreams of life as an artist and beatnik in Parisian cafes and garrets: confined to an Edwardian boarding school hostel in a provincial New Zealand town, I had plotted my escape to what Ashton-Warner described in Myself as "some bohemian studio on the Left Bank in Paris or over a bowl of wine in Italy, me all sophisticated and that, with dozens of lovers, paint everywhere and love and communion and sympathy and all that" (Myself, 212). When, in the early 1970s, I began secondary school teaching and read Teacher, that book built bridges between the frightening urgency of classroom survival, the enticing theories but alien classrooms described by American deschoolers and free-schoolers, and "what I believed myself to be when a girl on the long long road to school, a vagabond and an artist" (I Passed This Way, 307). As a young teacher I, too, had poured my impassioned soul into writing journals and poetry, painting, and playing the piano. Like Ashton-Warner, I had hoped that artistic self-expression could keep the mad woman in my attic at bay, for "asylums are full of artists who failed to say the things they must and famous tombs are full of those who did" (Incense to Idols, 169)