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Liquid Fuels and Energy Security - GEOS309
Fossil fuels – especially oil and gas – are a major and key component of Australia's energy supply, but have significant negative impacts on our environment. To refine the balance between fossil fuel exploitation and negative environmental impacts, it is important to understand how oil and gas are formed, how they are discovered and recovered, and how they can be utilised in less environmentally harmful ways. This unit combines geological and geophysical approaches to investigate exploration and production methods for crude oil, natural gas and coal bed methane, with a major focus on basin analysis, the key to understanding these processes. The key components of the petroleum system from source rocks formation through generation, expulsion, migration, accumulation and alteration in reservoirs are studied, as are mechanisms for oil and gas production from conventional and unconventional reservoirs. Similar technologies are also utilised for geosequestration of CO2 from burning coal ('clean coal'), and the opportunities for this in Australia are assessed. Many geological jobs are currently available in the petroleum industries, and it is clear that in the next 10 years there will be a surge in jobs related to unconventional energy and the geosequestration of CO2 from burning coal. This unit prepares students for those jobs.
| Credit Points: | 3 |
| When Offered: | 2015 - Next offered in 2015 |
| Staff Contact(s): | Professor Simon George |
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| Assessed As: | Graded |
| Offered By: | Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences Faculty of Science |
Timetable Information
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