Final report of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves describing their activities, findings, and recommendations for change to ensure the reserve components of the U.S. military are organized, trained, equipped, compensated, and supported to best meet the needs of the U.S. national security. This final report was informed by 7 days of public hearings, involving 115 witnesses; 52 Commission meetings; more than 850 interviews; and the detailed analysis of thousands of documents. It contains six major conclusions and 95 recommendations, supported by 163 findings.

The developments of fields in deep waters (5000 ft and more) is a common occurrence. It is inevitable that production systems will operate under multiphase flow conditions (simultaneous flow of gas-oil-and water possibly along with sand, hydrates, and waxes). Multiphase flow prediction tools are essential for every phase of the hydrocarbon recovery from design to operation. The recovery from deep-waters poses special challenges and requires accurate multiphase flow predictive tools for several applications including the design and diagnostics of the production systems, separation of phases in horizontal wells, and multiphase separation (topside, seabed or bottom-hole). It is very crucial to any multiphase separation technique that is employed either at topside, seabed or bottom-hole to know inlet conditions such as the flow rates, flow patterns, and volume fractions of gas, oil and water coming into the separation devices. The overall objective was to develop a unified model for gas-oil-water three-phase flow in wells, flow lines, and pipelines to predict the flow characteristics such as flow patterns, phase distributions, and pressure gradient encountered during petroleum production at different flow conditions (pipe diameter and inclination, fluid properties and flow rates). The project was conducted in two periods. In Period 1 (four years), gas-oil-water …

The Supreme Court has expressed an interest "that Congress be able to legislate against a background of clear interpretive rules, so that it may know the effect of the language it adopts." This report identifies and describes some of the more important rules and conventions of interpretation that the Court applies. Although this report focuses primarily on the Court's methodology in construing statutory text, the Court's approach to reliance on legislative history are also briefly described.

The Alaska North Slope offers one of the best prospects for increasing U.S. domestic oil and gas production. However, this region faces some of the greatest environmental and logistical challenges to oil and gas production in the world. A number of studies have shown that weather patterns in this region are warming, and the number of days the tundra surface is adequately frozen for tundra travel each year has declined. Operators are not allowed to explore in undeveloped areas until the tundra is sufficiently frozen and adequate snow cover is present. Spring breakup then forces rapid evacuation of the area prior to snowmelt. Using the best available methods, exploration in remote arctic areas can take up to three years to identify a commercial discovery, and then years to build the infrastructure to develop and produce. This makes new exploration costly. It also increases the costs of maintaining field infrastructure, pipeline inspections, and environmental restoration efforts. New technologies are needed, or oil and gas resources may never be developed outside limited exploration stepouts from existing infrastructure. Industry has identified certain low-impact technologies suitable for operations, and has made improvements to reduce the footprint and impact on the environment. Additional improvements are …

Polymeric membranes could potentially be the most flexible and viable long-term strategy for treatment of produced water from oil and gas production. However, widespread use of membranes, including reverse osmosis (RO) membranes, for produced water purification is hindered due to fouling caused by the impurities present in the water. Fouling of RO membranes is likely caused by surface properties including roughness, hydrophilicity, and charge, so surface modification is the most widely considered approach to improve the fouling properties of current RO membranes. This project focuses on two main approaches to surface modification: coating and grafting. Hydrophilic coating and grafting materials based on poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) are applied to commercial RO membranes manufactured by Dow FilmTec and GE. Crossflow filtration experiments are used to determine the fouling resistance of modified membranes, and compare their performance to that of unmodified commercial RO membranes. Grafting and coating are shown to be two alternative methods of producing modified membranes with improved fouling resistance.

This study focuses on laboratory studies with related analytical and numerical models, as well as work with operators for field tests to enhance our understanding of and capabilities for more efficient enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Much of the work has been performed at reservoir conditions. This includes a bubble chamber and several core flood apparatus developed or modified to measure interfacial tension (IFT), critical micelle concentration (CMC), foam durability, surfactant sorption at reservoir conditions, and pressure and temperature effects on foam systems.Carbon dioxide and N{sub 2} systems have been considered, under both miscible and immiscible conditions. The injection of CO2 into brine-saturated sandstone and carbonate core results in brine saturation reduction in the range of 62 to 82% brine in the tests presented in this paper. In each test, over 90% of the reduction occurred with less than 0.5 PV of CO{sub 2} injected, with very little additional brine production after 0.5 PV of CO{sub 2} injected. Adsorption of all considered surfactant is a significant problem. Most of the effect is reversible, but the amount required for foaming is large in terms of volume and cost for all considered surfactants. Some foams increase resistance to the value beyond what is …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This report is GAO's sixth annual assessment of selected weapon programs. Since 2000, the Department of Defense (DOD) has roughly doubled its planned investment in new systems from $790 billion to $1.6 trillion in 2007, but acquisition outcomes in terms of cost and schedule have not improved. Total acquisition costs for major defense programs in the fiscal year 2007 portfolio have increased 26 percent from first estimates, compared with 6 percent in 2000. Programs have also often failed to deliver capabilities when promised. DOD's acquisition outcomes appear increasingly suboptimal, a condition that needs to be corrected given the pressures faced by the department from other military and major nondiscretionary government demands. This report provides congressional and DOD decision makers with an independent, knowledge-based assessment of defense programs, identifying potential risks when a program's projected attainment of knowledge diverges from best practices. The programs assessed--most of which are considered major acquisitions by DOD--were selected using several factors: high dollar value, acquisition stage, and congressional interest. This report also highlights overall trends in DOD acquisition outcomes and issues raised by the cumulative experience of individual programs. GAO updates …

Various laboratory tests were carried at the R & D facility of BJ Services in Tomball, TX with BJ Services staff to predict and evaluate the performance of the Ceramicrete slurry for its effective use in permafrost cementing operations. Although other standards such as those of the American Standard for Testing Materials (ASTM) and Construction Specification Institute (CSI) exist, all these tests were standardized by the API. A summary of the tests traditionally used in the cement slurry design as well as the API tests reference document are provided in Table 7. All of these tests were performed within the scope of this research to evaluate properties of the Ceramicrete.

The overall objective of this research effort was to provide a potentially commercial thermal treatment of fly ash to decrease the interaction between fly ash and the surfactants used to entrain air in concrete when fly ash replaces a portion of the Portland cement in oncrete. The thermal treatment resulting from this research effort, and described in this report, fulfill the above objective. This report describes the thermal treatment developed and applies the treatment to six different fly ashes subsequently used to prepare concrete test cylinders hat show little or no difference in compressibility when compared to concrete test cylinders prepared using untreated fly ash.