Utah Heavy Oil Program

The Utah Heavy Oil Program (UHOP) was established in June 2006 to provide multidisciplinary research support to federal and state constituents for addressing the wide-ranging issues surrounding the creation of an industry for unconventional oil production in the United States. Additionally, UHOP was to serve as an on-going source of unbiased information to the nation surrounding technical, economic, legal and environmental aspects of developing heavy oil, oil sands, and oil shale resources. UHOP fulGilled its role by completing three tasks. First, in response to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 Section 369(p), UHOP published an update report to the 1987 technical and economic assessment of domestic heavy oil resources that was prepared by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. The UHOP report, entitled 'A Technical, Economic, and Legal Assessment of North American Heavy Oil, Oil Sands, and Oil Shale Resources' was published in electronic and hard copy form in October 2007. Second, UHOP developed of a comprehensive, publicly accessible online repository of unconventional oil resources in North America based on the DSpace software platform. An interactive map was also developed as a source of geospatial information and as a means to interact with the repository from a geospatial setting. All documents uploaded to the repository are fully searchable by author, title, and keywords. Third, UHOP sponsored Give research projects related to unconventional fuels development. Two projects looked at issues associated with oil shale production, including oil shale pyrolysis kinetics, resource heterogeneity, and reservoir simulation. One project evaluated in situ production from Utah oil sands. Another project focused on water availability and produced water treatments. The last project considered commercial oil shale leasing from a policy, environmental, and economic perspective

Metabolism-dependent bioaccumulation of uranium by Rhodosporidium toruloides isolated from the flooding water of a former uranium mine

Remediation of former uranium mining sites represents one of the biggest challenges worldwide that have to be solved in this century. During the last years, the search of alternative strategies involving environmentally sustainable treatments has started. Bioremediation, the use of microorganisms to clean up polluted sites in the environment, is considered one the best alternative. By means of culture-dependent methods, we isolated an indigenous yeast strain, KS5 (Rhodosporidium toruloides), directly from the flooding water of a former uranium mining site and investigated its interactions with uranium. Our results highlight distinct adaptive mechanisms towards high uranium concentrations on the one hand, and complex interaction mechanisms on the other. The cells of the strain KS5 exhibit high a uranium tolerance, being able to grow at 6 mM, and also a high ability to accumulate this radionuclide (350 mg uranium/g dry biomass, 48 h). The removal of uranium by KS5 displays a temperature- and cell viability-dependent process, indicating that metabolic activity could be involved. By STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) investigations, we observed that uranium was removed by two mechanisms, active bioaccumulation and inactive biosorption. This study highlights the potential of KS5 as a representative of indigenous species within the flooding water of a former uranium mine, which may play a key role in bioremediation of uranium contaminated sites.This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung grand nº 02NUK030F (TransAqua). Further support took place by the ERDF-co-financed Grants CGL2012-36505 and 315 CGL2014-59616R, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain

Advanced combustor design concepts to control NO{sub x} and air toxics. Quarterly report, [July--September 1996]

Understanding the mechanisms of char-N oxidation and reduction is necessary for the accurate modeling of NO, formation from coal combustion. This statement is especially true for combustors where low- NO{sub x} combustion modification techniques have been applied because in such cases the fraction of total fuel- NO{sub x} coming from the char is very high. This study has focused on obtaining experimental data that can be used to evaluate char-N oxidation and reduction mechanisms. The ultimate goal is to use this knowledge to improve the NO{sub x} submodel in an existing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. Several key experimental results were outlined in the report for the quarter ending 6/96. In order to clarify certain conclusions, more data were collected and analyzed during the quarter ending 9/96. Results from these new data as well as important results not included in the 6/96 report are addressed here

Soot volume fraction from extinction in JP-8 and heptane pool fires

Total extinction measurements from a multiple beam experiment using a 10mW laser diode are presented and compared to calculate soot volume fraction in heavily sooting pool fires from a 150 mm diameter pan of Jet Propulsion fuel 8 (JP-8) and heptane. Trends in attenuation are critiqued for the two fuels, and estimates of the axi-symmetrical distribution of soot are established.Tara L. Henriksen, Gus Nathan, Zeyad Alwahabi, Jennifer Spinti, Eric Eddings, Phillip J. Smit