The 1999 Oil & Gas Conference was cosponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Fossil Energy, Federal Energy Technology Center (FETC) and National Petroleum Technology Office (NPTO) on June 28 to 30 in Dallas, Texas. The Oil & Gas Conference theme, Technology Options for Producer Survival, reflects the need for development and implementation of new technologies to ensure an affordable, reliable energy future. The conference was attended by nearly 250 representatives from industry, academia, national laboratories, DOE, and other Government agencies. Three preconference workshops (Downhole Separation Technologies: Is it Applicable for Your Operations, Exploring and developing Naturally Fractured Low-Permeability Gas Reservoirs from the Rocky Mountains to the Austin Chalk, and Software Program Applications) were held. The conference agenda included an opening plenary session, three platform sessions (Sessions 2 and 3 were split into 2 concurrent topics), and a poster presentation reception. The platform session topics were Converting Your Resources Into Reserves (Sessions 1 and 2A), Clarifying Your Subsurface Vision (Session 2B), and High Performance, Cost Effective Drilling, Completion, Stimulation Technologies (Session 3B). In total, there were 5 opening speakers, 30 presenters, and 16 poster presentations.

The coordination chemistry of plutonium remains relatively unexplored. Thus, the fundamental coordination chemistry of plutonium is being studied using simple multi-dentate ligands with the intention that the information gleaned from these studies may be used in the future to develop plutonium-specific sequestering agents. Towards this goal, hard Lewis-base donors are used as model ligands. Maltol, an inexpensive natural product used in the commercial food industry, is an ideal ligand because it is an all-oxygen bidentate donor, has a rigid structure, and is of small enough size to impose little steric strain, allowing the coordination preferences of plutonium to be the deciding geometric factor. Additionally, maltol is the synthetic precursor of 3,4-HOPO, a siderophore-inspired bidentate moiety tested by us previously as a possible sequestering agent for plutonium under acidic conditions. As comparisons to the plutonium structure, Ce(IV) complexes of the same and related ligands were examined as well. Cerium(IV) complexes serve as good models for plutonium(IV) structures because Ce(IV) has the same ionic radius as Pu(IV) (0.94 {angstrom}). Plutonium(IV) maltol crystals were grown out of a methanol/water solution by slow evaporation to afford red crystals that were evaluated at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory using single crystal …