“O petroleo e nossa” or “The oil is ours!” has been the rallying cry of Brazil. In the last decade, Brazil has gone from a country that had to import much of the oil needed to run its economy, to an export country on the verge of joining OPEC. It took a national commitment for this to happen, because state owned oil companies are foundering elsewhere.

Pall Corporation has unveiled its first Technical Innovation Centre in Shanghai, China. The centre, which incorporates a filtration validation lab, provides comprehensive filtration technology support for the Chinese biopharmaceuticals industry. According to Pall the centre is the latest strategic addition to Pall's global capabilities for the Asia-Pacific biopharmaceuticals market.

Azerbaijan is the latest location for Bran+Luebbe's produced water chemical injection (PWCI) packages. The company has completed a multi-unit package designed to provide chemical dosing for a produced water treatment facility and the contaminated open drains treatment plant for an onshore-based production location.

Due to the physical size of the PWCI package, its construction has been divided into three separate units. The largest, weighing 42 tonnes, is the main chemical injection package which contains 11 stainless steel multi-compartment tanks and 32 Bran+Luebbe Novados P API double diaphragm pumpheads.

www.branluebbe.com

Drought conditions across the Southeast have begun affecting power plant operations. According to the Associated Press, 24 of America’s 104 nuclear reactors are in areas now experiencing the most severe levels of drought, and 22 of those plants draw their cooling water from rivers and lakes. Recently, the level of several of those lakes nearly fell to the minimum necessary to continue reactor operation. Last August, for example, Tennessee Valley Authority said that higher inlet water temperatures caused by lower water levels had forced load curtailments or plant shutdowns at its Browns Ferry, Gallatin, and Cumberland plants. Reduced hydro generation has been another consequence of the drought (see “Water’s role in power generation”).

ELGA Process Water has launched a new service called 'All-in-Pack®' which provides water treatment systems to end users on a rental basis.

The idea of All-in-Pack® is that the customer pays a fixed quarterly payment for ELGA Process Water to provide a water treatment plant and service it, just as they would if the customer had purchased the plant outright. ELGA Process Water's national service director, John Pethers, surveyed customers to see whether they would prefer to buy or rent their water treatment system and concluded: ‘A surprising number said they'd prefer to rent, so we developed this scheme in association with one of our corporate banks.”

www.elgaprocesswater.co.uk

Private equity firm First Reserve Corp. has completed the acquisition of Spanish energy company Gamesa Solar for a total consideration of $406.5 million.

The U.S.-based firm’s acquisition of Gamesa along with its purchase in Italy of Ener3, a company that designs and builds photovoltaic power plants, has created a European renewable energy group with the ability to deliver solar capacity of up to 400 MW in Southern Europe over the next four years, First Reserve said in a release Monday.

The group expects that two-thirds of this capacity will be delivered to customers on a turnkey project basis, while the remaining capacity will be developed on its own account.

Remedial Offshore recently announced the purchase of V228 medium-speed diesel engines from GE Marine, Erie, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. The engines will be used to power a new breed of offshore well servicing equipment, which is Remedial Offshore’s Elevating Support Vessel (ESV) design.

BioteQ Environmental Technologies Inc is to begin the second of six potential water treatment projects identified in its November 2006 joint venture agreement with Jiangxi Copper Company (JCC), China's largest copper producer.

The first project by the the joint venture company, JCC-BioteQ Environmental Technologies Co Ltd, was the plant at JCC's Dexing site, and this is now operational. The joint venture has since initiated work on the second project, located at JCC's Yinshan mine site in Jiangxi Province. The first stage of this second project has been approved and a design report is to be conducted jointly by BioteQ and JCC to define the scope of the Yinshan project, including plant capacity and cost estimates.

Rotork has won a framework agreement for the supply of electric valve actuators to a UK water and wastewater services company, Thames Water. The exclusive agreement is set to run for a minimum of three years.

The majority of actuators supplied will be the IQ and IQT models. Thames Water was amongst the first of the UK 's water companies to use Rotork's IQ ‘non-intrusive' intelligent actuator technologies when first launched in 1993. Rotork's two-wire control capabilities, particularly regarding Profibus networks, were also important contributors to the Thames Water decision.

Energy now lost as heat during the production of electricity could be harnessed through the use of silicon nanowires synthesized via a technique developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. The far-ranging potential applications of this technology include the DOE’s hydrogen fuel cell–powered “Freedom CAR” and personal power-jackets that could use heat from the human body to recharge cell phones and other electronic devices.

In January 2001, the world held its breath when the tanker Jessica, loaded with 150,000 gallons of fuel, struck a reef and began breaking up in the heart of one of the most precious, famous, and fragile ecosystems on Earth—the Galapagos Islands. At risk were vast numbers of unique species of flora and fauna written about by Charles Darwin in studies that contributed to his landmark theory of evolution by natural selection.

The sight of thousands of gallons of oil pouring into the ocean off the Galapagos island of San Cristobal triggered a determined international initiative to mitigate risks of future spills by dramatically reducing the islands’ dependence on diesel fuel to generate electricity.

In December 2007, Wärtsilä got its first order for a Wärtsilä GasCube power plant. PT PLN (Persero) Wilayah Kalimantan Timur, a regional subsidiary of the Indonesian state-owned utility company PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) (Persero), ordered two GasCubes for a single site in Bontang in the province of East Kalimantan.

Both plants incorporate a Wärtsilä 16V34SG gas engine rated at 7 MW (Figure 1). The two GasCubes are due to be handed over in March 2009. They will run on locally available natural gas to generate electricity for the national grid. The GasCubes were selected because of their high generating efficiency and small footprint

On a perfect New Mexico winter day—with the sky almost 10% brighter than usual—Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems (SES) set a new solar-to-grid system conversion efficiency record by achieving a 31.25% net efficiency rate. The old 1984 record of 29.4% was toppled January 31 by SES’s “Serial #3” solar dish Stirling system at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility (Figure 1).

The growth in China’s CO2 emissions is far outpacing previous estimates, making the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases even more difficult, according to a new analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley and UC San Diego. The study is scheduled for print publication in the May issue of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

Tenaska Inc. is developing a site near Sweetwater, Texas, for a new 765-MW gross, 600-MW net supercritical coal-fired power plant that will capture up to 90% of the CO2 in the stack gas. The captured CO2 will to be used in enhancing oil production in the Permian Basin. The proposed construction site for the $3 billion Trailblazer Energy Center is a 1,919-acre tract east of Sweetwater and north of Interstate 20 in Nolan County. Construction could begin in late 2009 and be completed in 2014 (Figure 1).