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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 1,747 records · Page 97
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2017

Carbon balance of CO2-EOR for NCNO classification

The question of whether carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) constitutes a valid alternative for greenhouse gas emission reduction has been frequently asked by the general public and environmental sectors. Through this technology, operational since 1972, oil production is enhanced by injecting CO2 into depleted oil reservoirs in order displace the residual oil toward production wells in a solvent/miscible process. For decades, the CO2 utilized for EOR has been most commonly sourced from natural CO2 accumulations. More recently, a few projects have emerged where anthropogenic CO2 (A-CO2) is captured at an industrial facility, transported to a depleted oil field, and utilized for EOR. If carbon geologic storage is one of the project objectives, all the CO2 injected into the oil field for EOR could technically be stored in the formation. Even though the CO2 is being prevented from entering the atmosphere, and permanently stored away in a secured geologic formation, a question arises as to whether the total CO2 volumes stored in order to produce the incremental oil through EOR are larger than the CO2 emitted throughout the entire CO2-EOR process, including the capture facility, the EOR site, and the refining and burning of the end product. We intend to answer some of these questions through a DOE-NETL funded study titled “Carbon Life Cycle Analysis of CO2-EOR for Net Carbon Negative Oil (NCNO) Classification”. NCNO is defined as oil whose carbon emissions to the atmosphere, when burned or otherwise used, are less than the amount of carbon permanently stored in the reservoir in order to produce the oil. In this paper, we focus on the EOR site in what is referred to as a gate-to-gate system, but are inclusive of the burning of the refined product, as this end member is explicitly stated in the definition of NCNO. Finally, we use Cranfield, Mississippi, as a case study and come to the conclusion that the incremental oil produced is net carbon negative.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2014

Assessment of simulated water balance from Noah, Noah-MP, CLM, and VIC over CONUS using the NLDAS test bed

This study assesses the hydrologic performance of four land surface models (LSMs) for the conterminous United States using the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) test bed. The four LSMs are the baseline community Noah LSM (Noah, version 2.8), the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC, version 4.0.5) model, the substantially augmented Noah LSM with multiparameterization options (hence Noah-MP), and the Community Land Model version 4 (CLM4). All four models are driven by the same NLDAS-2 atmospheric forcing. Modeled terrestrial water storage (TWS), streamflow, evapotranspiration (ET), and soil moisture are compared with each other and evaluated against the identical observations. Relative to Noah, the other three models offer significant improvements in simulating TWS and streamflow and moderate improvements in simulating ET and soil moisture. Noah-MP provides the best performance in simulating soil moisture and is among the best in simulating TWS, CLM4 shows the best performance in simulating ET, and VIC ranks the highest in performing the streamflow simulations. Despite these improvements, CLM4, Noah-MP, and VIC exhibit deficiencies, such as the low variability of soil moisture in CLM4, the fast growth of spring ET in Noah-MP, and the constant overestimation of ET in VIC.

Cai, Xitian↗
DOE OSTI2017

Atlantic meridional heat transports computed from balancing Earth's energy locally

Abstract The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation plays a major role in moving heat and carbon around in the ocean. A new estimate of ocean heat transports for 2000 through 2013 throughout the Atlantic is derived. Top‐of‐atmosphere radiation is combined with atmospheric reanalyses to estimate surface heat fluxes and combined with vertically integrated ocean heat content to estimate ocean heat transport divergence as a residual. Atlantic peak northward ocean heat transports average 1.18 ± 0.13 PW (1 sigma) at 15°N but vary considerably in latitude and time. Results agree well with observational estimates at 26.5°N from the RAPID array, but for 2004–2013 the meridional heat transport is 1.00 ± 0.11 PW versus 1.23 ± 0.11 PW for RAPID. In addition, these results have no hint of a trend, unlike the RAPID results. Strong westerlies north of a meridian drive ocean currents and an ocean heat loss into the atmosphere that is exacerbated by a decrease in ocean heat transport northward.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Global Sensitivity of Simulated Water Balance Indicators Under Future Climate Change in the Colorado Basin

The Colorado River basin is a fundamentally important river for society, ecology and energy in the United States. Streamflow estimates are often provided using modeling tools which rely on uncertain parameters; sensitivity analysis can help determine which parameters impact model results. Despite the fact that simulated flows respond to changing climate and vegetation in the basin, parameter sensitivity of the simulations under climate change has rarely been considered. In this study, we conduct a global sensitivity analysis to relate changes in runoff, evapotranspiration, snow water equivalent and soil moisture to model parameters in the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrologic model. Here, we combine global sensitivity analysis with a space-filling Latin Hypercube sampling of the model parameter space and statistical emulation of the VIC model to examine sensitivities to uncertainties in 46 model parameters following a variance-based approach.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗