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Hackers are messing with the oil and gas industry

by CoryDescoteaux Posted on November 18, 2015

Hackers are messing with the oil and gas industry

By on 18 Nov 2015commentsShare

The best part about an oil and gas addiction — besides all the pollution, environmental degradation, and crippling income inequality, of course — is how pathetically vulnerable it makes us to cyber attacks.

Say you’re a hacker. Pick a cool name — something like Krazy Keys or The Epidemic. Now, say you want to really fuck with the U.S. economy (you’re still reeling over those damn Starbucks cups). What better way to take down Uncle Sam than to target the slick, gooey oil that is his life blood? Fortunately for you, Cyber Satan, a growing number of oil and gas companies are making that pretty easy to do.

By connecting their infrastructure to the ever-expanding network of internet-enabled devices known as of the Internet of Things (check out our explainer video here), these companies are automating their operations and thus improving efficiency, but they’re also opening themselves up to cyber attacks. Here’s more from Motherboard:

The industry has a lot of different moving parts and processes, including pump control, blow-out prevention, and managing gas storage. Unexpected changes to these processes or the operations technology systems that run them can have a major impact like production stoppages or even damage to the infrastructure.

“Maybe the hackers’ intentions may not be to destroy something, but by not understanding the full picture of the system or what component of it they are messing with, they can have a real catastrophic effect,” said (cyber security expert Jasper Graham). This could be anything from bringing productivity to a standstill to disabling alarm systems or communications between workers on the field, which could put their safety at risk.

Already, there have been a number of attacks on oil companies around the world. In 2012, a group called The Cutting Sword of Justice (real name) attacked Saudi Aramco, partially or fully wiping files on 35,000 computers, Motherboard reports. The hackers didn’t manage to tamper with any pumping or drilling operations, but the company did have to temporarily shut down all of its computers. And last year, dozens of oil companies in Norway fell prey to unidentified internet marauders. Even Anonymous is getting in on the action, according to Motherboard. The notorious hacking group targeted gas stations earlier this year.

Unfortunately, oil and gas companies aren’t the only ones failing to protect themselves against cybersecurity threats. The Internet of Things is taking over a lot of our infrastructure, and most of that infrastructure isn’t ready to take on hackers. On the plus side, the oil industry is pretty evil, so as long as Queen Crypto and The Wackadoodle aren’t hurting anyone or creating serious economic mayhem, more power to them. And besides, the environmental movement is always in desperate need of a little badassery. These Hackers might just do the trick:

Source:

The Internet of Things Is Making Oil Production Vulnerable to Hacking

, Motherboard.

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Hackers are messing with the oil and gas industry

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Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

by CharityMullens Posted on September 21, 2015

Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

By on 21 Sep 2015 4:20 pmcommentsShare

It’s always irksome when tech companies talk about their latest “moonshot.” The actual moonshot was one of the most incredible accomplishments of humankind. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged NASA to put someone on the moon by the end of the decade, and NASA, which hadn’t even put someone in orbit yet, was like, “On it, boss,” and then had three people on the moon eight years later. So sorry, Google, even if Google Glass hadn’t flopped, it wouldn’t have been a moonshot, and neither will anything else that comes out of the “moonshot factory.”

So it’s a real bummer to find out that the agency that today’s most powerful engineers and entrepreneurs so desperately want to emulate had a mind-blowingly awesome plan for a space-based solar factory back in the ’70s that never came to fruition. Here’s the scoop from Motherboard:

At the height of the oil crisis in the 1970s, the US government considered building a network of 60 orbiting solar power stations that would beam energy down to Earth. Each geosynchronous satellite, according to this 1981 NASA memo, was to weigh around 35,000 to 50,000 metric tons. The Satellite Power System (SPS) project envisaged building two satellites a year for 30 years.

To get said power stations into orbit, the once-powerful aerospace manufacturing company Rockwell International designed something called a Star-Raker, which, in addition to sounding like something from a sci-fi movie, also would have acted like one:

The proposed Star-Raker would load its cargo at a regular airport, fly to a spaceport near the equator, fuel up on liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and take off horizontally using its ten supersonic ramjet engines. A 1979 technical paper lays out its potential flight plan: At a cruising altitude of 45,000 feet, the craft would then dive to 37,000 feet to break the sound barrier. At speeds of up to Mach 6, the Star-Raker would jet to an altitude of 29km before the rockets kicked in, propelling it into orbit.

Just to recap: The Star-Raker would have broken the speed of sound by diving seven miles. And the spacecraft would have been making so many regular trips to orbit that it would have essentially been a 747 for space, Motherboard reports.

In terms of feasibility, here’s how one scientist put it at the time:

“The SPS is an attractive, challenging, worthy project, which the aerospace community is well prepared and able to address,” physicist Robert G. Jahn wrote in the foreword to a 1980 SPS feasibility report. “The mature confidence and authority of [the working groups] left the clear impression that if some persuasive constellation of purposes … should assign this particular energy strategy a high priority, it could be accomplished.”

Putting solar plants in space would’ve been hard, sure, but this proposal came just 10 years after NASA landed Apollo 11 on the moon, so doing seemingly impossible things was kind of their thing. Even if SPS hadn’t happened as planned (and for more details on what exactly that plan was, check out this in-depth look from Wired), there’s no doubt that with the right amount of support and funding, NASA could’ve done something incredible in the cleantech arena.

Today, NASA remains an indispensable source of climate change research. Unfortunately, politicians aren’t as eager to throw money at the agency now that we’re no longer trying to show up the Soviet Union (in fact, the U.S. government is now relying on Russia to take U.S. astronauts up to the International Space Station). And some members of Congress (lookin’ at you, Ted Cruz) have it in their heads that NASA shouldn’t even be doing Earth sciences research in the first place.

We know from the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars back in 2012 that NASA still has the ability to inspire and astonish. People geeked out hard over those “seven minutes of terror” and for good reason. Getting that same kind of support behind something that addresses climate change would be exactly what this world needs. If only the one organization proven capable of doing moonshots wasn’t beholden to a bunch of science-hating idiots.

Source:

The Space Plane NASA Wanted to Use to Build Solar Power Plants in Orbit

, Motherboard.

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Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

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Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

by SergioBPFL Posted on May 19, 2015

Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

By on 19 May 2015commentsShare

You know how sometimes humans freak out about genetic engineering? It’s time to freak out again! Except this time it’s a good thing: Scientists are figuring out how to use new gene-editing technologies to eliminate antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

The Tel Aviv-based researchers, whose work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science yesterday, used a new method of gene therapy called CRISPR to selectively slash the DNA of an antibiotic-resistant strain of E. coli. The method uses a virus as its vector to infect the bacteria’s cells (it doesn’t affect human cells at all) and target the exact sequence of genetic base-pairs that confers antibiotic resistance. When it locates that sequence, the virus latches on and excises the offending gene with surgical precision. With the one-two punch of CRISPR and conventional antibiotics, even the toughest infections might soon be easily mopped up.

It’s worth repeating that when it comes to GMO panic, some of that fear is founded while some is a knee-jerk uneasiness with anything that seems “unnatural” — and all of it is a little confused. As Grist’s Nathanael Johnson has pointed out, genetic engineering is a tool, and like any tool — a shovel, a gun, a Facebook post — it can be used for good things or bad ones or just scary sci-fi stuff that we don’t know enough about to start Frankenstein-ing around with.

I happen to believe eliminating antibiotic-resistant infections that infect 2 million people a year would be a very good thing indeed.

Source:
This New Gene Editing Technique Could Turn The Tide on Antibiotic Resistance

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Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

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Climate change is melting Arctic archaeological sites

by BudLionsxdip Posted on April 29, 2015

sod it all

Climate change is melting Arctic archaeological sites

By on 29 Apr 2015commentsShare

If you think about it — bear with us here — the Arctic is basically a huge freezer full of history’s leftovers. There’s a millennium worth of crusty villages, a bunch of gnawed-on beluga bones, and don’t forget the last of that takeout mammoth wayyyy at the back.

What’s even grosser than that delightful mental image is the fact that, as the Arctic heats up, all that old stuff formerly frozen in permafrost is thawing out — i.e. your leftovers are starting to rot — threatening the integrity of archaeological sites around the Arctic. Here’s the story from Motherboard:

[With] global climates heating up, the Arctic’s active layer [the top layer of permafrost that melts and refreezes every year] extends deeper every summer, and one of the largest contributing factors to the destruction of arctic sites is thawing permafrost. This great thaw is leaving organic artifacts to rot — or, in some cases, wash into the ocean — forcing arctic archaeologists to survey and excavate the most important sites before they’re gone.

Those organic artifacts include entire centuries-old Inuit sod-houses, perfectly preserved in their deep-freeze … until now. Since they’re too big to be moved, archaeologists are trying to map digitally before they melt like so much ice cream left out on the counter.

One of the team’s excavation sites, what was once the village of Kuukpak, is a classic area for large scale beluga whale hunting in historic Inuit culture. The site is in an ecotone — an area where multiple ecozones overlap — making it an incredibly rich environment with over 50 species of mammals as well as numerous fish and bird species. Such generous conditions made Kuukpak home to some of the largest Inuit villages ever to have existed.

“This site had probably about 500 people, compared to an average [site] of about 150, this site is really a massive site by Northern standards,” [team leader] Dr. Friesen said.

Along with a wealth of artifacts, like animal bones and hunting tools, Dr. Friesen’s team excavated the first fully uncovered sod house, a traditional Inuit lodging that would have housed between 15 to 30 people in the 1400s.

…

But Kuukpak won’t last long. Like so many other rich arctic archaeological sites it is being destroyed by erosion at an alarming rate.

In places like Kuukpak, the coastline is moving inland 15 feet every year, as sea level rises and permafrost subsides into muck. Friesen explained that all that erosion can add up fast: “When you think of an average early Inuvialuit site that might be 100 metres by 30 metres, that means you can lose an entire site in a decade.”

To give my admittedly overstretched metaphor of the thawing freezer one last reach: I guess that means we better start digging into our leftovers — but in this case, literally digging.

Source:
The Great Arctic Thaw Is Seriously Worrying Archaeologists

, Motherboard.

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Climate change is melting Arctic archaeological sites

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All oil is bad, but some is worse. Here’s the difference.

by OIEWendiororpg Posted on March 12, 2015

All oil is bad, but some is worse. Here’s the difference.

By on 12 Mar 2015commentsShare

Though all oils are dirty, some are dirtier than others. High-profile case in point: the Canadian tar sands. The fact that tar-sands oil is one of the filthiest oils in the world has helped fuel the debate around the Keystone XL pipeline.

The good folks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thought someone had better analyze which oils were a bad idea to extract, and which oils were a really, really, really bad idea to extract. CEIP teamed up with Stanford and the University of Calgary to develop an oil-climate index; the result of their work is documented in a new report titled “Know Your Oil.”

The team found that there’s at least an 80 percent difference in greenhouse gas emissions per barrel between the worst oil researchers looked at and the least worse. The worst, by the way, is Suncor Synthetic H — unsurprisingly, a type of tar-sands crude from Alberta. The least damaging oil they looked at is from the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

One particularly carbon-intensive crude comes from California’s Midway Sunset oil field. (“Yes, some of the worst oil for the climate is pumped out of one of America’s greenest states,” Brian Merchant points out at Motherboard. In fact, it’s the top-producing field in the state. Ha! Irony!) This oil needs to be softened with steam before it can be extracted, and the water to make that steam is heated using huge quantities of natural gas. The oil, once flowing, is heavy and waterlogged, and takes an unusual amount of energy to be lifted out of the ground. And after that, it’s complex to refine. “The combination of energy used in extraction and refining means almost half of Midway Sunset’s total greenhouse gas emissions are released before the resource even gets to market,” says the report.

Examples like the Canadian tar sands and California’s Midway Sunset field underscore one of the report’s main points: “The fate of the entire oil barrel is critical to understanding and designing policies that reduce a crude oil’s climate impacts.” When thinking about these oils, it’s not just the oil itself that threatens the environment. It’s the whole process of getting it out of the ground, getting it to a refinery, refining it, and getting it to consumers — all of that spews carbon into the air, contributing significantly to oil’s role in fueling climate change.

Years ago, that wasn’t so much the case. We only dealt with a few types of oil, and they were relatively easy to get at and refine. But now, companies are finding new, energy-intensive ways to get at oil wherever it may be — trapped in shale, mixed with sand or water, sitting in pools deep below the ocean or sheets of ice in the Arctic, or even several miles underground. Rather than cutting off our addiction, we’re researching new ways to squeeze every last drop out of the earth — even as the evidence piles up that the addiction is ultimately fatal.

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All oil is bad, but some is worse. Here’s the difference.

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