bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Business Case for Process Safety
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 157592, ’The Business Case for Process Safety,’ by Scott Berger, Center for Chemical Process Safety, prepared for the 2012 SPE/APPEA International Conference on Health, Safety, and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production, Perth, Australia, 11-13 September. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
Over its 27-year history, the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) has observed that the first step toward implementing a strong process-safety-management program is obtaining top-management commitment. The CCPS has learned that communicating the business case for process safety is an important part of the process of obtaining this commitment. Using a fictional incident as a case-study example, this paper will illustrate that process safety can have financial, as well as ethical and professional, benefits.
Introduction
The CCPS has identified four dimensions in which process safety can influence the value of the business:
Corporate responsibility
Business flexibility
Risk reduction
Sustained value
These dimensions affect financials in both quantitative and qualitative ways, addressing both cost savings and revenue enhancement. Table 1 illustrates the alignment of these four dimensions.
The Incident
One January day several years ago, a major process vapor line ruptured in the core unit of the Phlogiston Chemical Company Western Plant. Minutes later, a serious explosion ripped through the unit. The blast wave dislodged a nearly empty vessel, ripping it from its connecting piping. The vessel contained a toxic material that dispersed downwind, along with thick black smoke from the fire that resulted from the explosion.
The company’s emergency-response team, along with local firefighters, responded rapidly. While residents took shelter, the responders set up a water curtain to mitigate the toxic release and worked to extinguish the fire. Unfortunately, when the response team sounded the all-clear signal 4 hours later, nine workers and one town resident were dead. Another 25 families gave thanks that their loved ones would recover from their injuries.
Ultimately, investigators determined that a main flange in the vapor line had been bolted incorrectly and that the mounting brackets of the vessel containing the toxic material had corroded. A root-cause analysis showed that the technician assigned to the plant’s mechanical-integrity program had simply been “checking the boxes” for the previous 5 years and that management never spot-checked the mechanical-integrity program to verify that it was being practiced as written.
Abnormal-Situation Management in Offshore Operations
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 166584, ’Abnormal-Situation Management and Its Relevance to Process Safety for Offshore Operations,’ by Dal Vernon Reising and Peter Bullemer, Human Centered Solutions, and Bruce Colgate (retired), prepared for the 2013 SPE Offshore Europe Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition, Aberdeen, 3-6 September. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
The Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium performed a root-cause analysis on 32 incident reports gathered from public documents and member companies. The analysis identified common failure categories and manifestations in these incidents. Consequently, the consortium completed three case studies on potential deployment solutions: one supporting better shift-handover communication, a second supporting better alarm-flood situations, and a third supporting better situation awareness by use of overview displays using qualitative gauges.
Introduction
The ASM Consortium has been working for almost 20 years with an emphasis on human-factor engineering to address process-safety and operational challenges for downstream hydrocarbon-processing and petrochemicals companies. These consortium members have jointly invested in research and development to create knowledge, tools, and products designed to prevent, detect, and mitigate abnormal situations that affect process safety in the control/operations environment. The consortium has placed a continual emphasis on the humans that use automation and technology to operate the production processes, focusing extensively on human factors, human reliability, and process safety. Recently, the consortium has expanded its focus to upstream enterprises, with many of the operating company members having extensive oil and gas businesses.
What Are Abnormal Situations?
The ASM Consortium has defined abnormal situations as “undesired plant disturbances or incidents with which the control system is not able to cope, requiring a human to intervene to supplement the actions of the control system.” An abnormal situation could be a simple upset condition quickly recognized and rectified by operator action, or an abnormal situation could escalate to a critical process-safety incident, where a safety system must be engaged for an emergency shutdown and evacuation is required. The objective of ASM is to bring the process back to normal before safety-shutdown-control systems or other safety-protection systems are engaged.
This definition is specifically used to distinguish between normal, abnormal, and emergency situations from the perspective of console operations. Often, operator error is blamed for causing incidents, and companies rush to increase training as a panacea. The work of the consortium has shown that incidents are caused by a multitude of factors, and solutions to address incidents need to consider the human operator’s role, the technology involved, and the system design, as well as the environment.
Unconventional Polycrystalline-Diamond-Bit Design Allows Significant Performance Gains
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 156961, ’Departure From the Norm in Polycrystalline-Diamond-Bit Design Allows Significant Performance Gains in Highly Erosive and Abrasive Formations,’ by Aron Deen, Jason Maw, Craig Knull, and John Clegg, SPE, Ulterra Drilling Technologies, prepared for the 2012 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, San Antonio, Texas, USA, 8-10 October. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
This paper discusses the design, manufacture, and application of a contiguous blade of polycrystalline diamond (PCD). This bit has full-length, contiguous PCD coverage, without gaps between cutters on each blade, as in a conventional PCD-compact (PDC) bit design. The implementation of this bit represents a step change in bit design.
Drill-Bit Damage
The traditional view has been that PCD cutters are the most important part of the PDC bit because they are required to engage the formation and maintain their geometrical properties long enough for shear drilling to be economical. The bit body, then, is necessary only in order to hold the cutters in their arranged layout, and to convey mechanical and hydraulic power to remove the rock in their path.
PCD cutters are very hard and resistant to abrasion, but are susceptible to damage from their relative lack of toughness. Bit-body materials, whether made of steel or tungsten carbide composite hard facing or infiltrated matrix, are more prone to failure in the drilling environment. One drill-bit design limitation is a requirement for sufficient body material to exist to create a pocket to which the PCD cutter will be brazed. In the case of the webbing be-tween the cutters, depicted in Fig. 1, this puts the body material in a position where it is likely to engage either the formation or high-velocity fluid flow.
Invention and Hypothesis
The premise that there has to be enough body material to constitute a braze pocket leads to the conclusion that there has to be a webbing between the cutters. The resulting engineering problem was to optimize this webbing, on the basis of the need for cutter exposure and material strength of the body material. But does a braze pocket need to be constructed entirely from body material?
Erosion and Abrasion. The first obvious benefit of this new design philosophy should be that, given that there is no weak point of webbing subjected to abrasive or erosive wear, intercutter or cross-blade abrasion and erosion will be mitigated. The webbing between the cutters is the area most susceptible to this mechanism along the fluid path.
Abrasion occurs because of the same design weakness—the webbing—but be-cause of a different mechanism. As illustrated in Fig. 2, abrasion is more uniform because of the rotation of the bit. It occurs when the bit body contacts the formation and is worn away. The result, though visibly different from erosion, shares a similarity in terms of location.
Technology Focus: Water Management (December 2013)
Authors: Ali Syed A. 
Published: February 2015

Technology Focus
Produced water is an inextricable part of the oil- and gas-recovery process, and it is by far the largest-volume waste stream associated with oil and gas recovery. More than 20 billion bbl of water is produced each year in the United States, and more than 90 billion bbl of water is produced annually worldwide. The management of these large volumes of water is an increasing challenge for the oil and gas industry, not only from a technical and economical point of view but also for all environmental issues related to its management. A substantial part of these volumes is directly reinjected into hydrocarbon reservoirs to maintain reservoir pressure and to displace oil to producing wells. The remaining water is treated for disposal or reuse, which includes injection for enhanced oil recovery and fracture stimulation. Produced-water handling and treatment represents an estimated USD 18 billion cost to the US oil and gas industry. It is estimated that each 1% reduction in water production in the US would save USD 50 million to 100 million.
The treatment of produced water can be challenging because of variability in both quality and quantity of the produced-water stream. The quantity of produced water varies significantly over the lifetime of a field. Early on, the water-production rate can be a small fraction of the hydrocarbon-production rate, but it can increase with time to tens of times the rate of hydrocarbon produced. In terms of composition, the changes are complex and reservoir-specific because they are a function of the formation lithology, the oil and water (both in-situ and injected) chemistry, rock/fluid interactions, production type, and required additives for oil-production-related activities.
Many different types of technologies are available to treat produced water; however, the types of constituents removed by each technology and the degree of removal must be considered to identify potential treatment technologies for a given application. For some types of produced water, more than one type of treatment technology may be capable of meeting the contaminant-removal target, and a set of selection criteria must be established to narrow down multiple treatment options.
The papers featured this month deal with produced-water-treating systems, produced-water-reinjection design, and water management. I hope you enjoy reading the selected papers and will search for additional papers in the OnePetro online library.
Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.
OTC 24199 Water Management for EOR Applications—Sourcing, Treating, Reuse, and Recycle by Lisa Henthorne, Water Standard, et al.
SPE 165356 Water Management in Mature Oil Fields Using Preformed Particle Gels by Ali Goudarzi, The University of Texas at Austin, et al.
SPE 165693 Maximizing Flowback Reuse and Reducing Freshwater Demand: Case Studies From the Challenging Marcellus Shale by Kushal Seth, Baker Hughes, et al.
SPE 163803 Aeration and Microfiltration for Solids Removal of Produced Water From the Barnett Shale by Tor H. Palmgren, M-I Swaco, et al.
Cyclic-Production-Scheme Performance Evaluated Using Reservoir Simulation
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 164168, ’Appraising the Performance of a Cyclic-Production Scheme Through Reservoir Simulation: A Case Study,’ by Tariq Al-Zahrani, Saudi Aramco, prepared for the 2013 SPE Middle East Oil and Gas Show and Conference, Manama, Bahrain, 10-13 March. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
Many strategies have been implemented to mitigate the problem of high water-production rates seen in mature fields. One of these is the cyclic-production scheme (CPS). This strategy, which requires alternately shutting and flowing wells with high water cut over a predetermined time, enhances sweep efficiency and pressure maintenance and reduces water-handling costs. In a reservoir-simulation model of a mature oil field evaluating a total of 93 wells, simulation runs involving several scenarios showed significant advantage in applying a CPS.
Introduction
Water management has become a key strategy in fields that have entered a high-water-cut development period. As fields mature, there is a natural tendency for water volumes to increase as aquifer and injected water advances toward the producers. Furthermore, increasing levels of water production can impair oil-production rates, in some cases to the point at which the well ceases to be economical to produce. Although injected water is an enabler for improved hydrocarbon recovery, it is essential to control water-production volumes and the flood front. High water production may limit oil production in a rate-limited well, increasing water-treatment and -disposal costs.
One option to reduce water production from high-water-cut wells is to convert to cyclic production. Cyclic wells are alternated between shut-in and producing phases that normally last for 6 months each. The result of closing in these wells is significant water reduction with minimal impact on oilfield production. The main benefit of the cyclic strategy is the reduction of water production, which allows optimization of the water-injection process, minimizing recirculation and allowing a better displacement of the waterflood front to the updip offset producers. Because less injected water is recirculated, the operational handling costs decrease and the economic efficiency of the water-injection project improves.
This study was implemented in a mature field as a part of water-management efforts to reduce water production. In this study, a reservoir-simulation model was developed on the basis of very fine geological characterization, and the field-performance history was matched. The model’s history matching was constantly updated by use of up-to-date reservoir-surveillance, pressure, water-saturation (for flood-front detection), and new-infill-well data. The predictive capability of the reservoir-simulation model is very good. Simulation runs were conducted to analyze and optimize the impact of a CPS on the production performance of the field.
Portable Medical Equipment Holder Assists Pediatric Venipuncture
Authors: Strehle Eugen-Matthias , Needham Thomas William 
Published: February 2015

Objectives:
Phlebotomy and venous cannulation are common, technically challenging and potentiallydistressing procedures in pediatrics. The aim of this pilot study was to assess whether a novel medical equipment holdercould be a useful adjunct for venipuncture in children.

Methods:
Doctors and nurses at a district general hospital were asked to analyze the portable medical equipment holderand complete a questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of twelve questions regarding seniority of the practitioner andtheir opinions of the device.

Results:
Fifty-three questionnaires were completed by a variety of pediatric health professionals. Overall, 98% ofparticipants rated the device as useful, 2% assumed a neutral position and no practitioner described the device as notuseful. A positive first impression was shared by 92% of the participants. A non-disposable device was preferred over thedisposable alternative. The square shape and plain colour of the prototype were considered suitable by the majority ofparticipants. Plastic was the preferred material. The modal price range suggested for a non-disposable device was £5 ($8)or less. Several modifications to the design were suggested.

Conclusion:
The portable medical equipment holder was well received by the pediatric staff. Design modifications putforward by the participants progressed to the development of an improved device. Further clinical research, preferably in amulti-centre study, is required.
Big Data Analytics in Financial Statement Audits
Authors: Cao Min , Chychyla Roman , Stewart Trevor 
Published: February 2015

SYNOPSIS
Big Data analytics is the process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling Big Data to discover and communicate useful information and patterns, suggest conclusions, and support decision making. Big Data has been used for advanced analytics in many domains but hardly, if at all, by auditors. This article hypothesizes that Big Data analytics can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of financial statement audits. We explain how Big Data analytics applied in other domains might be applied in auditing. We also discuss the characteristics of Big Data analytics, which set it apart from traditional auditing, and its implications for practical implementation.
Evidence on Contagion in Earnings Management
Authors: Kedia Simi , Koh Kevin , Rajgopal Shivaram 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACT
We examine contagion in earnings management using 2,376 restatements announced during the years 1997–2008. Controlling for industry and firm characteristics, firms are more likely to begin managing earnings after the public announcement of a restatement by another firm in their industry or neighborhood. Such contagion is absent when the restating firm is disciplined by the SEC or class action lawsuits, suggesting deterrent effects of enforcement activity. Contagion among peers is observed (1) in the same account as the one restated by the target firm, or (2) when larger target firms restate or the restatement is prominently disclosed, or (3) when the target firm's restatement is less severe. Contagion stops during the years 2003–2005, possibly due to the enforcement associated with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), but reappears during 2006–2008, perhaps because the sting associated with SOX has worn off. In sum, peers' actions appear to affect a firm's earnings management decisions.
Large size and high light do not lower the cost of reproduction for the Neotropical herb Goeppertia marantifolia
Authors: Matlaga David P. , Horvitz Carol C. 
Published: February 2015

• Premise of the study: Sexual reproduction is often associated with a cost in terms of reduced survival, growth, or future reproduction. It has been proposed that plant size and the environment (availability of key resources) can sometimes lower or even nullify the cost of reproduction.• Methods: We address this issue experimentally with the Neotropical herb Goeppertia marantifolia, by manipulating sexual reproductive effort and measuring the demographic performance of plants and of their clonal offspring, in the context of natural variation in light availability.• Key results: Plants in the high‐reproductive‐effort treatment grew less between seasons but did not differ in their probability of flowering the second season or in inflorescence size compared with plants in the low‐effort treatment. Reproductive effort of parent plants influenced the leaf area of their clonal offspring. Plants that invested less in sexual reproduction produced clonal offspring that were initially larger than those produced by plants that invested more in reproduction. The magnitude of this effect was greater in parent plants that received two seasons of the manipulated reproductive effort than in those that received a single season. The trade‐off between reproductive modes dampened with time, leading to smaller differences in clonal offspring leaf area between treatments over time.• Conclusions: We found evidence of a cost of reproduction and trade‐offs between reproductive modes, although the magnitude of these costs was small. However, we found no evidence of lower costs of reproduction for larger plants or for plants in higher‐light environments over our 2‐yr study period.
Enseignements empiriques et éthiques d'une biffe sociologique parmi les éboueurs parisiens
Authors: Le Lay Stéphane 
Published: February 2015

Cet article propose une discussion méthodologique de l’observation participante partiellement incognito qui a été mise en œuvre dans le cadre d’une enquête de terrain menée en tant qu’éboueur de la ville de Paris. Il s’agit de fournir, à la manière des travaux d’ethnographie réflexive, des éléments de compréhension sur la manière dont a été appréhendé le rapport au métier, et à expliciter la façon dont les activités ont peu à peu affaibli l’observateur participant, jusqu’à le pousser à abandonner le terrain. En particulier, l’article insiste sur les liens, du point de vue du sociologue, entre engagement du corps, éthique et santé au travail. En engageant sa subjectivité en une configuration professionnelle éprouvante et inconnue de lui, ce dernier se place certes dans une posture favorable à la compréhension de certains phénomènes (comme la « biffe »), mais en le faisant sur un terrain dont il est socialement et culturellement éloigné et dans des conditions éthiques potentiellement critiquables, il court le risque de se trouver dans l’incapacité d’accéder à l’ensemble des ressources permettant aux travailleurs de faire face à leurs activités quotidiennes.
Wat is witwassen eigenlijk?
Authors: Kruisbergen E.W. , Soudijn M.R.J. 
Published: February 2015

What is money laundering? An introduction to theory and practice
In this article, which serves as an introduction, the authors take a closer look at theoretical definitions as well as empirical manifestations of money laundering. They discuss the judicial definition and the often used theoretical distinction between ‘three stages’ of money laundering. Furthermore, the authors provide the reader with a quick overview of several forms of money laundering. This overview is based on actual criminal investigations. It covers the transfer of cash money and ‘concealed consumption’, both of which are frequently overlooked by authors who use the three stages model. Also ‘traditional’ forms of money laundering such as loan backs, abuse of legal trade, feigning gambling profit, structuring of real estate deals and ‘new’ forms, i.e. the use of bitcoins, are dealt with.
De illegale economie en nationaal inkomen
Authors: Kazemier B. , Rensman M. 
Published: February 2015

The illegal economy and national income
In 2014, almost all countries of the European Community have revised their National Accounts. Besides the introduction of some important methodological and theoretical improvements, now income from illegal activities are included in the estimates of the national income. For the Netherlands the inclusion of illegal activities has increased gross national income by some 0.4%. This is less than the overall average for the European Community.