American Oil Operations Abroad

A lab with a view: American postdocs abroad.

As recently as the early 1970s, a postdoctoral research experience overseas was a valued part of training for a U.S. biologist aspiring to an academic position. Not only did the U.S. scientists benefit educationally from participating in different laboratory and cultural systems, but labs outside the United States were enriched by the ideas, perspectives, and skills brought by the visiting rese...

Separation of oil and water in oil spill recovery operations *

The separation of water from oil that is collected in any oil spill recovery operation is a continuing and necessary requirement during every stage of the effort. Its importance is reflected in the cost of transport and storage of large volumes of oily water, the salvage value of separated oil and the added labor costs associated with long-term recovery operations. This paper addresses the effe...

Optimal Scheduling of Refinery Crude-Oil Operations

This thesis deals with the development of mathematical models and algorithms for optimizing refinery crude-oil operations schedules. The problem can be posed as a mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP), thus combining two major challenges of operations research: combinatorial search and global optimization. First, we propose a unified modeling approach for scheduling problems that aims at brid...

Derivative-Free Optimization for Oil Field Operations

A variety of optimization problems associated with oil production involve cost functions and constraints that require calls to a subsurface flow simulator. In many situations gradient information cannot be obtained efficiently, or a global search is required. This motivates the use of derivative-free (non-invasive, blackbox) optimization methods. This chapter describes the use of several deriva...

Work Abroad