The Resources Inventory

Australia has secured what is perhaps the biggest deal in the global transport sector this 2013 by way of a $5.3 billion deal with a locally-led private consortium for the lease of two major state-owned seaports.

The winning bidder is the NSW Ports Consortium, which is comprised of Industry Funds Management, Australian Super, QSuper, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. The bid involved Port Botany and Port Kembla, two big seaports in the Australian state of New South Wales.

Port Botany handles a variety of products that include natural gas, oil, and petroleum. Port Kembla ships coal and steel.

Australian officials initially projected the seaports’ lease deal will net $2.96 billion.

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via The Mining Journal

According to resource industry exports, auctioning off the licenses in exchange of cash will drive operational costs upwards and stunt the growth of the industry, in particular that of coal seam gas. The state government, on the other hand, said that its plans were justified since mining companies had access to the state’s rich resources.

The auctions will start next week through a competitive cash bidding process of the petroleum areas to interested resource proponents – both domestic and international. Accordingly, the preferred bidder, will gain exclusive exploration rights to the land that was made available in the auction. The rights would still be subject to conditions, according to the Queensland government.

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NewSat’s Terrestrial Backhauling”>Instrumentation in petrochemical industries are basically the following: flowmeters, the quantification of bulk fluid movement; pressure transmitters/sensors, which measure pressure, typically of gases or liquids; level meter; temperature instruments, where temperature is a physical property that quantitatively expresses the common notions of hot and cold; and analysis instruments, or “analyser”/”analyzer,” a person or device that analyses given data; etc.

The measurement of temperature is a vital part of instrumentation in petrochemical (chemical products derived from petroleum) industries. Resistance thermometers, also called “resistance temperature detectors” (“RTDs”), made up of platinum, a chemical element with the chemical symbol “Pt” and an atomic number of 78, are sensors used to measure temperature by correlating the resistance of the RTD element with the temperature. They are often used as they are more instructive and give a better response.

See: NewSat’s Terrestrial Backhauling

Petroleum is a naturally occurring liquid found in rock formations, consisting of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons of various molecular weights, plus other organic compounds. Generally, it is accepted that oil is made mostly from the carbon rich remains of ancient plankton after exposure to heat and pressure in the Earth’s crust over hundreds of millions of years. As time goes by, the decayed residue was covered by layers of mud and silt, thus, sinking it down deeper into the Earth’s crust and preserved there between the hot and pressured layers. It will then transform into oil reservoirs.

Petroleum is the raw material for many chemical products (petrochemical)—pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. Thus, the petroleum industry includes the global processes of: hydrocarbon exploration (oil and gas exploration), the search by petroleum geologists and geophysicists for hydrocarbon deposits beneath the Earth’s surface, such as oil and natural gas; extraction of petroleum, the process by which usable petroleum is extracted and removed from the Earth; oil refinery or petroleum refinery, an industrial process plant where crude oil is processed and refined into more useful petroleum products, such as naphtha, gasoline, diesel fuel, asphalt base, heating oil, kerosene, and liquefied petroleum gas; transporting, often by oil/petroleum tankers (merchant ships designed for the bulk transport of oil) and pipelines transport (transportation of goods through a pipe), and marketing petroleum products, traded on various oil bourses based on established chemical profiles, delivery locations, and financial terms.

The industry is usually divided into three major components: upstream, midstream, and downstream. The upstream oil sector is a term commonly used to refer to the searching for and the recovery and production of crude oil and natural gas. On the other hand, the downstream oil sector is a term used to refer to the refining of crude oil, and the selling and distribution of natural gas and products derived from crude oil. Midstream operations include elements of traditional upstream and downstream business; usually included in the downstream category.  

Petroleum is vital to many industries, the production of an economic good or service within an economy. It is of importance to the maintenance of industrial civilization itself, and thus is a critical concern for many nations.

Oil accounts for a large percentage of the world’s energy consumption, ranging from as low as 32% for Europe and Asia, up to a high of 53% for the Middle East, a region encompassing Western Asia and Northern Africa.

Other geographic regions’ consumption patterns are as follows: South and Central America (44%), Africa (41%), the world’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent, after Asia, and North America (40%).

The world consumes 30 billion barrels (4.8 km2) of oil per year, with developed nations being the largest consumers. The United States consumes 25% of the oil produced in 2007. The production, distribution, refining, and retailing of petroleum taken as a whole represents the world’s largest industry in terms of dollar value.

Governments like the US government provide a heavy public subsidy to petroleum companies, with major tax breaks at virtually every stage of oil exploration and extraction. It includes costs of oil field leases and drilling equipment.

See: Satellite Communications in Australia