(39d) Fluid Flow Challenges to Meet for the Growing Demands for Energy

Global
population is expected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050 putting tremendous
pressure on delivering energy to meet the expected demands.  An integral part of this solution will
continue to be the use of fossil fuels, conventional and unconventional.  Due to various issues, geopolitical to
technical costs to new technology requirements, it is expected that the
production rate of oil will plateau around 100 Mbbpd.  However, this assumes tremendous
improvements in the ability to recover oil in existing an
new oil reserves.  In large part,
the technical challenges for this recovery improvements
are governed by transport phenomena and physical chemistry.  From the fluid flow in low permeable
reservoirs with nano scale pores with surface
heterogeneity, to the challenge of oil extraction from unconventional resources
like oil sands in multiphase processes. 

The
challenges facing society is to get to sustainable / renewable energy.  The industry is still very small today
and is projected to be still a small fraction percentage overall energy used in
2030 but this is largely due to technical challenges, high cost and the need
for some significant breakthrough technologies / solutions. Within the
renewable energy space, fluid flow challenges are predominantly related to
solution processing, coating processes, separation processes and catalytic
processes. As our ability to control features at the nano
scale improves, the interplay between transport process and physical chemistry
becomes even more important for renewables
technology.

This talk
will aim to provide an overview of future energy demand in the face of climate
challenges and help place in context some of the engineering challenges we face
and where fluid flow related problems are or will be present.