Would you like to know how the world’s biggest independent gas company sees the future? You have a chance.

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On Friday afternoon, after conference closure, Shell have kindly offered to conduct tours of their laboratory facilities. There is no charge for this. Places are limited for obvious reasons and we expect to be oversubscribed. If we are, we will select the lucky few at the end of March. Sorry, it’s the fairest way we can think of.

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Some Background?

Almost incredibly, Shell have been carrying out research and development in Amsterdam for over a hundred years. They have made a little progress since then!! They started with nine research employees. Today about 1000 people are employed in the Shell Technology Centre Amsterdam (known as STCA).

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The STCA is a research and development success in its own right. It was opened in 2009 and is one of Amsterdam’s largest building. It is almost carbon neutral. Electricity is supplied from wind power, or solar power panels that, when the sun shines in Amsterdam can generate 45 MWh of electricity. When the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow, there is an underground thermal storage to control, building temperature.

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So, What Goes On in the STCA?

What do all these people do you might. Maybe we’ll find out. This is what they say:

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• Gas technology (Gas-to-Liquids, Gasification, Carbon Capture, Gas & Liquid treating, liquefied Natural Gas).

• Downstream technology (Process Development, Catalysis, Hydrocarbon Refining, Base Chemicals, EOG /Solvents, Analytical Techniques).

• Engineering (Pipelines, Flow Assurance & Subsea, Fluid Flow & Reactor Engineering, Mechanical Materials Integrity, Materials & Corrosion, Utilities &Heat Transfer)

• Hydrocarbon Recovery (Rock and Fluid Science, Enhanced Oil Recovery)

• New Energies (New Fuels, Integrated Energy Solutions and Connected customer)

 

Apparently, STCA lead the way in 3D printing, they have one of the world’s largest CT scanners, which won’t help much with your medical problems but is just the job for studying the interaction between rocks and fluids. Now how could that relate to the oil industry?

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Rather bizarrely, they have some state of the art glass blowing facilities. We need to know more about that for sure.

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The Laboratory Tours are to be booked in conjunction with one of our conference passes.