Deepwater Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Scenarios Development and Their Associated Risk Assessment

World’s growing energy demand has pushed oil companies to explore and produce hydrocarbons in complex and technologically challenging deepwater environments. These difficult and complex operations involve the risk of major accidents as well, demonstrated by disasters such as the explosion and fire on the UK production platform Piper Alpha and capsizing of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). Accidents cause death, suffering, pollution of the environment, disruption of business and bad reputation to oil industry. A quantitative risk analysis technique has been used in this study to identify and categorize risk associated with different life phases of a deepwater well. Volume of oil released to the environment is used as a risk indicator. Five oil spill scenarios related to drilling and production life phases of a deepwater well are modeled. Risks associated with drilling an exploratory well in the deepwaters of GoM are analyzed in Scenario-1. A representative well location and corresponding reservoir properties were used to estimate the worst case discharge rates (WCD). Fault tree analysis (FTA) was performed to identify and categorize different hazards. Unexpected pore pressure and delayed response to an emergency situation were identified as two most important parameters contributing to overall risk of the system. In Scenario-2 an underground blowout was modeled by using representative geological settings from Popeye-Genesis field. A shallower low pressure zone is exposed to a deeper high pressure zone during drilling. The time to recharge the shallower zone to its fracture pressure is estimated. The shallower zone will transmit hydrocarbons to sea floor once its fracture pressure is reached. Risks associated with production life phase of a deepwater well are modeled in scenario-3. A representative well location and corresponding reservoir properties were used to estimate the WCD. FTA showed that sand screen and subsea tree control failures were main elements contributing to risk. In scenario-4 risk associated with floating production and offloading (FPSO) system for GoM are quantitatively and qualitatively presented. Scenario-5 deals with oil spill risk associated with severe weather conditions. An example mudslide calculation for SP-70 block of GoM is presented

Simulations of the primary cement placement in annular geometries during well completion using computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

Effective zonal isolation during primary cementing is only possible when drilling mud in the annulus is completely displaced with cement, while the spacers aid in this process. During the displacement process the rheological properties of fluids used and the operating conditions control the motion of different fluids interfaces; desired stable interfacial displacement leads to piston like motion. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool with the Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) has been validated against experimental and used to conduct numerical experiments in a virtual well model consisting of 50 ft vertical section of 8.765 x 12.5 annulus having initially mud and this mud is swept by one annular volume of spacer followed by one annular volume of cement. The 50 ft section was further divided into five subsections each of length 10 ft and average values of quantities for these sections were used for further analysis. The mud and cement properties were kept constant and the spacer density, viscosity and displacement rate were the only controlling parameters to achieve the piston like displacement. The spacer density and viscosity were varied between water and cement with cement being the heaviest and most viscous fluid. Three Reynolds numbers of 100, 167 and 400 were simulated. Temporal variation of the mud volume fraction was used as an indication for the piston like interfacial displacement. For an ideal piston like interfacial displacement the mud fraction reduces sharply with minimum residual mud volume after the spacer sweeps through. A gradual mud reduction represents fluid fingering and the fluctuations in the mud fraction represent fluid mixing. The best displacement was observed when the spacer had the same density as mud while it has the viscosity similar to water. The displacement process was least effective when the spacer had the density equal to cement for all viscosity ranges. Based on the simulation results, a correlation was developed to find the final placed cement volume fraction in the annulus under similar fluid conditions, the utility of CFD based correlation is also presented. Further development of the correlation for varying spacer volume at other operating conditions may be needed to extend its applicability

Performance Management System “Habib Bank Limited” A Case Study of Bahawalpur

The purpose of this study is to identify the drawbacks of the system in the organization and to know the majors problems which are affecting the system. Research is based on exploratory study on the Habib bank of Pakistan quantitative data is collected and analyzed qualitatively. Employees were unaware from the working of the system and its clarity is questioned on the basis of the politics within the organization so it’s better to conduct seminars and to be fair in decisions. There should be fair system and proper feedback given to the employees. Keywords: Performance Management, HBL, Performance appraisal, Performance management system

Impact of Behavioral Finance & Traditional Finance on Financial Decision Making Process

This paper examines the individual investment preferences and discusses the different factors of behavioral finance which are related to investment influence in developing countries like, Pakistan. Introduction simply discuss difference between traditional and behavioral finance literature consists on different factors of behavioral finance and traditional finance. Third portion consists on impact of both traditional and behavioral finance on investment the fourth sections discusses the comparison of different research results and at the last part contained the conclusion. Keywords: Behavioral Finance, Traditional Finance, Investment Decision. Efficient Market Hypothesis

University Libraries in Pakistan

The paper aims to examine the development and growth of the university libraries in Pakistan. It also examines the obstacles in the provision of better library services in the universities of the country. The study is based on an exten- sive review of the available literature, personal observations of the author and discussions with the senior library professionals. It was found that the situation of university libraries in Pakistan is a satisfactory compared to other types of libraries, but they are not meeting the required standards and are not participat- ing in the universities' educational and research programs satisfactorily

Investigation of Ionic Liquid as Hydrate Inhibitor at Different Range of Temperature and Pressure

Hydrate is an ice-like structure which is formed by the interaction between water molecules and natural gas at high pressure and relatively low temperature. Methane hydrate deposit is identified at deepwater marine settings and permafrost settings [1]. In this project, the equilibrium phase of methane hydrate is measured in the presence of ionic liquid as hydrate inhibitor. Ionic liquid is chosen due to its dual function inhibitors which can give thermodynamic and kinetic inhibition effects. In contrast to conventional thermodynamic inhibitor such as methanol and ethanol, ionic liquid is needed in a low dosage and it is environment friendly solvents [2]. The performance of this ionic liquid towards the equilibrium phase boundary of methane hydrate is studied using the hydrates studies system (HYDREVAL). From the literature research studied, 1 wt% of 1-butyl-3-methyl-imidazolium bromide ([BMIM]-Br) is used as ionic liquid and several runs are conducted at pressure range of 3 - 6 Mpa to investigate the performance of [BMIM]-Br at different pressure and temperature. The equilibrium phase of methane hydrate in the presence of [BMIM]-Br is compared with other hydrate inhibitors from previous studies likes methanol and [EMIM]-Cl. In the presence of [BMIM]-Br, there is a temperature shift on the equilibrium phase of methane hydrate. Compare to conventional thermodynamic hydrate inhibitor, methanol shows a significant temperature shift. However, high dosage of methanol is needed to give a significant thermodynamic effect

An enhanced gated recurrent unit with auto-encoder for solving text classification problems

Classification has become an important task for categorizing documents automatically based on their respective groups. Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) is a type of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and a deep learning algorithm that contains update gate and reset gate. It is considered as one of the most efficient text classification techniques, specifically on sequential datasets. However, GRU suffered from three major issues when it is applied for solving the text classification problems. The first drawback is the failure in data dimensionality reduction, which leads to low quality solution for the classification problems. Secondly, GRU still has difficulty in training procedure due to redundancy between update and reset gates. The reset gate creates complexity and require high processing time. Thirdly, GRU also has a problem with informative features loss in each recurrence during the training phase and high computational cost. The reason behind this failure is due to a random selection of features from datasets (or previous outputs), when applied in its standard form. Therefore, in this research, a new model namely Encoder Simplified GRU (ES-GRU) is proposed to reduce dimension of data using an Auto-Encoder (AE). Accordingly, the reset gate is replaced with an update gate in order to reduce the redundancy and complexity in the standard GRU. Finally, a Batch Normalization method is incorporated in the GRU and AE for improving the performance of the proposed ES-GRU model. The proposed model has been evaluated on seven benchmark text datasets and compared with six baselines well-known multiclass text classification approaches included standard GRU, AE, Long Short Term Memory, Convolutional Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, and Naïve Bayes. Based on various types of performance evaluation parameters, a considerable amount of improvement has been observed in the performance of the proposed model as compared to other standard classification techniques, and showed better effectiveness and efficiency of the developed model

Testing Purchasing Power Parity

We defined the purchasing power parity (PPP) in the scenario of Pakistan and India as a long term unit elasticity of exchange rate and compared it with relative national prices. The characteristic of finite sample are analyzed through time series regression analysis. It allows the cross sectional dependency, country heterogeneity and non-stationary disorder. Because the deviation of PPP is decrease with very slow rate, we execute the test on the data of 43 years. The past studies have showed that data was collected on the basis decades, like some of the researcher data contained on 08, 35 and 55 years. Additionally using the time series regression, this study observed the structural changes over a long term period. In this study, result identifies that the real exchange rate of India and Pakistan are not constant. The practical evidence shows that long run PPP holds for the sample countries. Keywords: Purchasing Power Parity; Exchange rate; Time Series Regression Test; Relative National Price

Studi tentang eksistensi Ahmadiyah di Surabaya

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui Eksistensi Jemaat Ahmadiyah yang berlokasi di Surabaya, dan interaksinya dengan masyarakat yang tinggal di lingkungan Jemaat Ahmadiyah tepatnya di Surabaya. Ahmadiyah adalah salah satu dari beberapa organisasi yang ada dalam Islam. Organisasi ini didirikan oleh Mirza Ghulam Ahmad di Qadian India, yang secara singkat ajarannya sedikit berbeda dengan ajaran Islam pada umumnya, salah satu ajaran yang paling menonjol adalah paham atau pengertian mengenai nabi. Keberadaan JAI (Jemaat Ahmadiyah Indonesia) menimbulkan beberapa kontroversi dalam masyarakat muslim beberapa tahun silam. Berangkat dari permasalahan tersebut maka peneiliti ingin mengetahui bagaimana respon masyarakat sekitar mengenai Ahmadiyah, dan juga ingin mengetahui lebih dalam lagi tentang Ahmadiyah dan ajaran-ajarannya. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan Kualitatif dengan metode Indepth Interview (wawancara mendalam). Pemilihan informan dalam penelitian ini dilakukan dengan teknik pengambilan data dari informan yang telah dikriteriakan sebelumnya. Kriteria tersebut adalah para pengurus dan anggota Jemaat Ahmadiyah di Surabaya yang terletak di Jl. Bubutan gang 1 serta masyarakat sekitar. Teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan adalah observasi yang dilakukan seacara partisipan, wawancara, dan dokumentasi

Testing Purchasing Power Parity: A Comparison of Pakistan and India

We defined the purchasing power parity (PPP) in the scenario of Pakistan and India as a long term unit elasticity of exchange rate and compared it with relative national prices. The characteristic of finite sample are analyzed through time series regression analysis. It allows the cross sectional dependency, country heterogeneity and non-stationary disorder. Because the deviation of PPP is decrease with very slow rate, we execute the test on the data of 43 years. The past studies have showed that data was collected on the basis decades, like some of the researcher data contained on 08, 35 and 55 years. Additionally using the time series regression, this study observed the structural changes over a long term period. In this study, result identifies that the real exchange rate of India and Pakistan are not constant. The practical evidence shows that long run PPP holds for the sample countries. Keywords: Purchasing Power Parity; Exchange rate; Time Series Regression Test; Relative National Price