WIRELINE ISSUE 27 SPRING 2014

WORKINGWITHUNIvERSITIES

SKILLSANDR&D

ABBhas invested almost £1million and signed a ten-year agreementwith ImperialCollegeLondon to support this carbon capturepilot plant teaching facility at theuniversity campus inSouthKensington,London.Over250 separateprocess instruments provide real-time feedbackon flow, temperature, pressure, pH and carbondioxide levels

Smart thinking It’soften said that ‘twoheads arebetter thanone’. This has certainlybeenproven in the caseof industry’s long-standing collaborationwith academia. BP, ABB andSenergy discuss how their partnershipswithUKuniversities are advancing research and development, addressing skills shortages and raising theprofileof oil and gas.

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and the other partnermembers are theUniversity of Cambridge, Imperial CollegeLondon and theUniversity of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign. The objective is to steer research and development (R&D) that advances the fundamental understanding anduse of materials in the energy sector. This is

Smartmaterials such as these,whose properties change in response to external stimuli, couldprove to be game-changing technology for the sector. Over the past 18months, BP has invested in theBP International Centre for AdvancedMaterials (BP-ICAM). It is based at theUniversity ofManchester

elf-lubricating’ and ‘self-healing coatings’… if youdon’t know much aboutwhat these scientific

termsmean, theymightwell seem like concepts that have a place in science fiction and have nothing todowith the work of theUKoffshore oil and gas industry. The reality couldn’t be more different.

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