Before watching the video can you say if you know the meaning of the following words, terms or phrases which are related to the topic?

dependence on oil and gas, fuel, drilling a well, the rig, radar operations, piper, the hole, the crew, tubing, hydrocarbons, fractured zone, bottom line, supply for oil and gas

2. Prepare three or four local/international news on oil and gas sphere and present to class. Bring different mass media issues related to the topic and present them in the class. Then try to inform the students about:

What are the key points of the article/issue? Why are they important? What have you found out new or old from the issues and why? What is the main vocabulary of the issues? Before inform the title or headline of your article/issue, then ask the others to guess what about the article/issue going to be about.

3. Explain the following processes related to oil with the help of the net and discuss with your class:

Origin of oil and gas

Theories of oil and gas origin

Exploring of oil and gas

Drilling a well

Well testing

Main jobs in oil and gas industry

Storage system

Transportation of oil and gas

Processing of oil and gas

Development level of oil and gas in different countries

4. Answer the questions about the video:

1) Does the people’s belief once about oil come true?

2) Why does producing oil and gas take so much time and money?

3) Why is the location so important?

FOCUS ON READING

Reading 1

1. A. Look at the headline of the article. What do you think this article is going to be about?

B. Read the first and the last paragraphs and the first sentence of the article. What do you think this passage is going to be about?

C. Now quickly scan the passage and circle all the words that have a connection to the title.

D. Scan the passage and cross out all the words you do not know. And try to guess the shortenings and abbreviations which are used in the text for what they stand for.

E. After looking at the headline and the first paragraph, make up some questions you think this article might answer.

F. What kind of article is this? Why would somebody read this? For information? For pleasure or any other reasons?

IS THIS THE YEAR?

Warren R. True Chief Technology Editor. –LNG/Gas Processing. From Oil and Gas Journal.

Oil and Gas Journal, January 11, 2010. Volume 108.1. www.ogjonline.com

Energy prognostications at this time of the year are as common as weather forecasts but often less accurate. In either case, the future becomes history more rapidly and painfully than we like, reminding us how myopic and ignorant we remain.

So it is for 2010 and it is likely to role in the evolution of energy sources to fuel global economic activity.

Not everyone agrees this activity and the human-derived carbon fuels that now run it are at fault for the current climate crisis – or even that such a crisis exists. This is not the place for that debate. For better or worse, consensus among world governments and scientists is pushing toward less dependence on carbon fuels.

It is possible that 2010 may stand in history a bit more brightly than other years, as a time when human efforts toward reducing carbon fuels turned a corner and thereby turned the world’s climate away from disaster.

Certainly, the past year yielded examples of such efforts. And it is important for oil and gas companies that many of these efforts employed natural gas as the fuel to reduce carbon emissions.

Skies and roads

In October, a Qatar Airways Airbus A340-600 completed the first commercial passenger flight using a fuel made from natural gas. Flying from London to Doha in 6 hr, the aircraft used Rollse-Royce Trent 556 engines.

Shell developed and produced the equal blend of synthetic gas-to-liquids kerosine and conventional oil-based kerosine, says the company.

Prospects for a cleaner burning should hearten ship owners and operators as well as airlines, given the pressures on ocean-trading vessels to reduce emissions.

Shell says Qatar will lead the world in producing GTL kerosene starting in 2012, when the first commercial quantities from Pearl GTL are to be produced. Pearl will produce about 1 million tones/year “enough to power a typical commercial airliner for half a billion kilometers,” the company says.

In the US in November, a joint venture of Waste Management Inc. and Linde North America began producing a clean motor-vehicle fuel at Waste Management’s Altamont landfill near Livermore, Calif.

The process employs a scaled-down version of a mixed-refrigerant LNG technology Linde installed at Statoil’s Snohvit 4.1 – tpy LNG plant near Hammersmith off Norway. The Altamont plant converts landfill gas-mostly methane-to more transportable LNG that is then revaporized and burned in Waste Management’s collection trucks.

Built and operated by Linde, the plant can produce up to 13,000 gpd of LNG, enough to fuel 300 of Waste management’s 485 LNG waste and recycling collection vehicles in 20 California communities, says Linde. Since commissioning in September, the plant had produced 200,000 gal of LNG by November.

Steve Eckhardt, the head of business development, alternative energy, for Linde, told for OGJ that the process eliminates the need for methane flaring at the landfill and reduces overall carbon emissions, compared with diesel fuel, by 20-30%/year. The site continues to operate the small carbon dioxide flare, he said.

Finally, last month AT&T awarded Clean Energy Fuels Corp. a contract to convert 463 Ford E -250 vans to run on CNG. Clean Energy’s subsidiary BAF Technologies Inc. will do the work for delivery in second-quarter 2010. BAF was already converting 600 vans for AT&T that were to be delivered by January 1.

In December, Clean Energy said AT&T had requested BAF to obtain CNG cylinders for 463 more conversions to be completed in third-quarter 2010, “although no formal order “had been made.

In addition to its CNG capacity, Clean Energy owns and operates two LNG production plants with combined capacities to produce 260,00 gpd of LNG with capacity to expand to 340,000 gpd.

The future?

Do projects such as these represent the future? That seems beyond question. More importantly, will they merge with a growing flood of similar projects to contribute to global reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions?

If they do and 2010 becomes the privotal year for such a wave of cleaner fuels, OGJ editors stand in a unique and enviable position to observe this evolution. Their mission is to cover oil and gas operations in the context not only of the integrated industry segments but also the wider world.

Cleaner hydrocarbon fuels-such as those mentioned above – promise that industry has many decades of life left.