The oomycete Pythium myriotylum is an important pathogen of several crops, causing wilt and damping-off during nursery propagation. The pathogen was recently reported as the causal agent of wilt and damping-off on Acacia crassicarpa plants in nurseries located in Riau, Indonesia. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relative pathogenicity of P. myriotylum on different clones of A. crassicarpa and Acacia mangium x Acacia auriculiformis hybrids. Based on the results, greater tolerance was found on the A. mangium x A. auriculiformis hybrid clones than on those of pure A. crassicarpa. The different Acacia clones also displayed different levels of tolerance of infection. Overall the results showed that screening for tolerance to infection by P. myriotylum will be important in the Acacia breeding programme and make it possible to produce sufficient nursery stock for plantation establishment.
Seagrass habitat is an important element of the coastal marine ecosystem, as it influences all major fields in the coastal environments. Due to anthropogenic and natural pressure, such identification of habitat distribution becomes crucial. Remote sensing can provide the best solution regarding time and cost to extract seagrass beds’ spatial and temporal information. When the low spatial resolution satellite image provides low accuracy and high uncertainty of seagrass distribution, we assess the high spatial resolution image product, the WorldView-2 image, to identify the seagrass bed distribution in Lancang Island. We confidently found that higher resolution images could leverage the mapping quality, especially on the seagrass beds, which could be highly sensitive to miss-detection. We can produce 83,75% overall accuracy using pixel-based classification; this is better among other low-resolution images for Instants, Landsat, and Sentinel. Our results suggest that the WorldView-2 image could perform better on seagrass beds identification, yet further improvement on more robust classification methods and algorithms could amplify the mapping and monitoring strategy. Based on this, it can be used as basic data to support future coastal ecosystem management on Lancang Island.
This paper seeks to demonstrate the application of learnings from the oil and gas industry, specifically in the field of geoscience, as they relate to applications within the growing industry of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS). Additionally, this paper will highlight how current educational programs are already geared to produce a talent pipeline for young professionals beginning their careers in the CCUS field or for later career professionals who are looking to transition into CCUS. To demonstrate the stated objectives, the fundamental theories and knowledge required to operate as a successful geoscientist in the oil and gas industry will be presented. This will include a discussion of basic skills and working knowledge as well as an introduction to various software utilized extensively within the oil and gas industry. This provides context illustrating where the geoscience community has been and the prior focus of many geoscience education pipelines. Then, a comparison of the oil and gas workflows to CCUS workflows will be made to demonstrate that the skills and techniques are aligned. Example workflows from our experience developing CCUS projects will be presented with a focus on the geologic characterization, such as generating subsurface geologic and structural models and developing reservoir models to predict plume migration. It will be made clear that the fundamentals of these workflows and the skills necessary to implement them are essentially the same. Both oil and gas and CCUS workflows utilize the same basic knowledge and geologic understanding (e.g., reservoir porosity, permeability, volumetrics), the same data (e.g., geophysical well logs, seismic reflection surveys, geologic core analysis) and even the same software. This demonstrates the direct application of knowledge and workflows that were previously gatekept by the oil and gas community and highlights their significance in ability to be applied to new opportunities. The discussion presented in this paper clearly identifies the overlap of experience gained throughout the detailed history of oil and gas exploration and its direct application to the burgeoning world of CCUS from the perspective of geologic characterization. The examples provided herein also demonstrate that the pipeline for creating new talent already exists with emphasis on learning the fundamentals of geoscience, and the specific application of those skills can be enacted seamlessly within the CCUS community.
This paper presents the results of a techno-economics analysis to quantify the potential for storing CO2 and producing lower carbon intensity oil from mature, onshore Australian oil fields located in the Cooper/Eromanga and Surat/Bowen Basins. The work explores the impact of incentivisation, identifies possible sources of CO2 to support CO2-EOR (enhanced oil recovery) deployment, and discusses global CO2-EOR policy. The hypothetical ‘carbon incentive’ assessed in this study resulted in unlocking an additional 40 million metric tons (Mt) of CO2 storage and 73 million barrels (MMBO) of domestic oil production compared to the base case scenario that most closely represent Australia’s current policy and economic settings. Further, the results of this study indicated that, with incentivisation, net-negative carbon dioxide emissions could be achieved by deploying CO2-EOR practices in certain mature oil fields. The study found that there are currently sufficient industrial sources of CO2, particularly from black coal-fired power generation and hard-to-abate industries such as cement and steel production, to support this deployment. An opportunity to explore the co-development of ‘stacked storage’ using both CO2-EOR and concurrent geologic storage of CO2 in adjacent, unconnected reservoirs is proposed. This may significantly reduce development costs compared to stand-alone geologic storage projects, providing more favourable techno-economics, and accelerating the physical connection of CO2 sources and sinks.