U of R Researching CO2 from all sides

Intended for publication the week of April 19, 2009.

 

By Brian Zinchuk

 

Pipeline News focuses on a different aspect of the oilpatch each month, areas drilling, consultants, trucking, etc. This month it was research in the oilpatch.

At first blush, one might think there’s not a lot going on in Saskatchewan, kind of like the theme for Corner Gas. You would be dead wrong.

What I found in Regina was in part intimidating, in part overwhelming, and in part in awe-inspiring. It was enough to fill three or four notebooks in two days of visits.

The University of Regina, with the Saskatchewan Research Council, has become a Mecca of research when it comes to the whole carbon dioxide issue. I ran into Koreans, Brits, an Estonian, and a Thai. The Brits are part of a Korean company that is studying carbon capture, for instance. And they’re doing it in Regina.

There are three research centres located at the U of R Innovation Place research park there whose work focuses on carbon dioxide, and how it relates to the oilpatch.

First there’s the Petroleum Technology Research Centre, or PTRC, which is stand-alone.

Then there’s the International Test Centre for CO2 Capture (ITC), and the International Performance Assessment Centre for Geologic Storage of CO2 (IPAC-CO2). The last two fall under the purview of the Office of Energy and Environment.

It seems that everyone you talk to involved with these organizations is doing something involving putting some sort of gas underground. Carbon dioxide is the leading candidate, for sequestration or sequestration via enhanced oil recovery. PTRC is also working with solvent vapour extraction, another EOR technique.

They’ve got you coming and going, when it comes to carbon dioxide. It’s kind of like the upstream/midstream/downstream of the oilpatch.  ITC’s efforts are on capturing carbon dioxide at its source, the upstream, as it were. PTRC is focusing on sequestering it underground, the downstream of the CO2 chain. Finally, IPAC-CO2’s role is to verify the carbon dioxide will indeed stay where you put it.

In a world where CO2 and the global warming associated with it is collecting Nobel prizes, it’s the field to be in when it comes to research. Indeed, the man who founded each of these research centres, the dynamic Malcolm Wilson, Ph.D., shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with ex-Vice President Al Gore, as a member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

 That’s heady company to be around, especially for a relatively small university like the U of R.  

It’s also not often you interview a Nobel laureate, or find one in Saskatchewan.

Yet this is the work that’s happening in Saskatchewan.

 Not all of it is carbon dioxide related. PTRC and the Saskatchewan Research Council are spending a lot of time on enhanced oil recovery. They’re working on a new tool that the PRTC director hints will have a large impact on knowledge of what is happening underground. If successful, that, too could have a substantial impact.

Dr. Wilson talks of building modular, off-the-shelf carbon capture units here, in Saskatchewan. It could be a whole new multi-billion dollar industry for this province. Got a power plant, or a refinery, or perhaps a cement plant? Call us up at 1-800-I GOT CO2, and we’ll bolt a capture unit on for you.

The world has seen research efforts like this before – think of all the money thrown at HIV/AIDS since the 1980s. That was for a small portion of society. This CO2 stuff is for the planet.

It’s going to take some time, but when the switch is thrown and people get serious about carbon capture, it is the folks in Regina they are going to be coming to. We could change the world, or, even perhaps, save it.

 

Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News (www.pipelinenews.ca). He can be reached at www.zinchuk.ca.

Might have to revamp Zinchuk.ca

It turns out friends in Vancouver and Toronto can’t get past my home page on www.zinchuk.ca, so I am getting a professional web design company to look at fixing it. Sorry if the damned thing hasn’t worked so far. Zinchuk

Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble

Or humbled. The interesting thing about wordpress is you can see exactly how many people view your page. The idea was to mention it in the Battleford and Preeceville papers, and see what happens.

Right now it’s 8 pm on Wednesday, delivery day for Battlefords News-Optimist. And so far, the number of page views today is….

Drum roll please…

Zero.

Thank you. Thank’s for coming out. You’ve been swell. Or was that my swelled head?

Hear that >pfffffttttttttt<? It’s my ego deflating.

Zinchuk

Zinchuk 2.0

Intended for publication the week of April 12, 2009

By Brian Zinchuk

I have been brainwashed.

After listening to hours upon hours of the podcast This Week in Photography (www.twiplog.com), hearing them go on and on about web 2.0 promotion, I have jumped in with both feet. Damn them.

Easter weekend meant some very, very late nights adjusting html code to bring me into the 21^st century. However, I got it pretty much all done in one weekend.

A little under year ago, I finally got a personal website with a personalized domain. The quaint personal websites everyone just HAD to have ten-twelve years ago really didn’t do much, and I hadn’t touched mine in years. Last summer, I had a photo shoot I just had to get online, RIGHT NOW, so I got a domain name and created a really pathetic site. Thus was born www.zinchuk.ca, hosted by M.R. Internet in North Battleford. I was lucky enough to have a name unique enough that no one else had grabbed the domain first. Much better to be a Zinchuk than a Smith, in this case.

It sat, neglected, since then, stillborn. It was time to breathe some life into this site.

I wanted to kill several birds with the same stone.  First, the blog:

Since 1992, 17 years this past March, I have been writing a weekly newspaper column. From the Top of the Pile has been around before Twitter, Facebook, blogs, personal webpages, Napster, eBay, MS Internet Explorer, Netscape, or even Mosaic – if you can remember back that far. It was a blog before there even was blogs, with a weekly readership in the thousands. Hopefully it will reach that online, eventually. Now it’s a blog. It can be found off the main www.zinchuk.ca site, or at www.brianzinchuk.wordpress.com.  If you ever wanted to comment on my weekly diatribes, here’s your chance.

WordPress.com makes it incredibly easy to set up a blog. I got it up, running, and adjusted in just a couple hours. If everything else had gone this smoothly, I would have been done in a day.

Then there’s Twitter. I really don’t like Twitter. I think it’s pretty much useless, with the 140 character limit. But now it’s part of the landscape, and if you drink the KoolAid on web 2.0, you need to be on Twitter, apparently. Thus begat www.twitter.com/brianzinchuk. Follow me, if you dare. Most of the tweets will probably be about the blog.

While I’m on Facebook, that’s not part of this. I want to keep something to myself.

Finally, one must get into the meat and potatoes of the website – promoting my little photography business – Brian Zinchuk Publishing.

A photographer without a website these days is like a farmer without a grain truck. How do you get your product to market? You don’t.

That’s where my long forgotten but limited html skills were dragged back, kicking and screaming, into the light. Make that the dark, because it’s impossible to work on code when the kids are awake. It’s not sexy by any stretch, but should do the job for the time being.

There’s not much point of having a website if you can’t make money off it, though, so I took This Week in Photography’s advice and signed up with an American online photo ordering service, www.pictage.com.  You shoot, they do the rest, apparently. It won’t replace my usual sales method, a booth in the lobby, but might provide some additional sales. I hope it works.

So what’s the point? In many ways, this is an experiment. Build it, and they will come, fingers crossed. The fundamental problem with putting something online is no one is going to find it unless they are looking for it. If you’re totally new, you’re going to be very much alone.

If you want to promote one media form, you have to do it in another media. That’s why radio stations buy billboard advertising, because no one is going to tune in to a station they aren’t listening to already, without a little nudge. As such, ironically, this bold experiment is getting its launch this week – in this newspaper.

Welcome to Zinchuk 2.0. I wonder what Zinchuk 3.0 will look like?

Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be found at www.zinchuk.ca

Welcome to From the Top of the Pile

Since 1992, 17 years this past March, I have been writing a weekly newspaper column. From the Top of the Pile has been around before Twitter, Facebook, blogs, personal webpages, Napster,eBay, MS Internet Explorer, Netscape, or even Mosaic – if you can remember back that far. It was a blog before there even was blogs, with a weekly readership in the thousands. Hopefully it will reach that online, eventually.

The column has picked up three columnist of the year awards from the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association – 2005, 2006 and 2008. Please forgive the big head. It makes it hard to walk through doors.

As for the name, “From the Top of the Pile,” it has nothing to do with the aforementioned big head. If you ever saw my desk, you would know what I’m talking about.

While there will likely be other postings to this blog, it’s primary purpose is for the weekly online posting of my column, written on Mondays.

The column focuses on pretty much anything that crosses my minde before deadline – politics, crime, child raising, business, and everything in between. As I’m now the editor of Pipeline News, expect to see some columns focusing on the oilpatch on a regular basis.

I love getting response to my column, so please, feel free to comment away. I’m always digging for column fodder, so if there’s something that ticks you off, feel free to let me know.
I’ve listened to too many podcasts of This Week in Photography (www.twipphoto.com), and have been brainwashed in the ways of web 2.0.

This blog is part of my full-court press to jump on the web 2.0 bandwagon. I’ve just launched my business website – www.zinchuk.ca – with the purpose of promoting my photography and writing. Since it was time to get that promotional tool in gear, I added a twitter feed – www.twitter.com/brianzinchuk, this blog, and will be adding online photo orders via wwwpictage.com. While I’m on Facebook, that’s not part of this. I want to keep something to myself.

So enjoy! Hope to see you each week.

Brian Zinchuk

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