DNV presents modelling of Hybrid cranes to the press, with promising results for the emerging maritime battery industry. In an effort to find out what the actual savings are from using batteries in hybrid ships, DNV has simulated the second by second operation of ship cranes.
At a tour of the Norwegian shipping scene in Bergen, maritime journalists were given a presentation of our simulation results (see here). Continue reading
DNV R&I Healthcare recently held a European Workshop on Risk management for Patient Safety in Brussels as mentioned in this blog some time ago. This workshop brought together international leaders in healthcare research, policy and practice. There was a lot of interaction on the day, which identified current challenges in risk management in healthcare and suggested further ways to reduce harm to patients.
We are pleased to share the report that distills the lessons from the workshop, written in collaboration with Professor Charles Vincent of Imperial College London. The critical messages are:
2. Significant progress in patient safety has been made in the last 20 years but this inconsistent across clinical settings, organisations and countries
3. One obstacle to further progress is how to move from small-scale innovation to spread and sustainability: breaking the cycle of ‘projectness’ to create lasting change at system levels
4. Risk management offers a potential way to create patient safety at a system level by providing a framework to address human, technological and organisational factors, i.e. the nexus where preventable harm most often arises
5. Despite its potential, evidence suggests that the use of risk management to deal with system vulnerability and variability in healthcare is at uneven levels of maturity
6. For healthcare to mature and capitalise on the value of risk management, action is needed on; tackling risk at a system level, more focus on the informal, political ‘art’ of improvement, promoting education for change and move away from thinking in terms of isolated service silos to reflect the realities of patient experience.
DNV is committed to work with others to tackle these challenges. Global Technical Director for Healthcare, Stephen McAdam, explains how we are contributing with this short video.
The fourth annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, the premier event in the US dedicated to transformative energy solutions, has come to an end. With more than 3000 participants and inspiring speakers, the energy at the Summit itself should be enough to spark some changes going forward.
ARPA-E received its first funding in 2009, and is the Energy Industry’s equivalent to DARPA, the US defense research program which spawned the internet and GPS. Now if ARPA-E can come up with anything as transformative as the internet, we are in for an exciting future in energy.
Looking at the different exhibitors at the technology showcase of the Summit, there is no doubt that researchers and scientists are trying hard to find solutions to the growing energy demand in the world. While we are all busy searching for the next transformative technologies, anything that can give us safe, more efficient and cleaner energy should be tried and tested. You never know what the next big thing will spring out of, and this seems to be the thinking of ARPA-E attendees also.
The Summit brought together thought leaders from academia, business, and government to discuss cutting-edge energy issues and to facilitate relationships to help move technologies into the marketplace. DNV is currently funded by ARPA-E for our ground breaking battery project on sensing and battery life extensions. We have other projects in the pipeline for future energy solutions also, which we demonstrated at the technology showcase for the ARPA-E audience.
A couple of years ago, the researchers at DNV Research and Innovation’s lab in Ohio asked themselves how we can convert CO2 into a useful product. All the developments for capture and storage sparked an idea for a process to utilize CO2. The process, now named ECFORM™, is solar powered and capable of converting CO2 into a value added chemical – formic acid.
CO2 utilization is being increasingly recognized not only as a method by which global CO2 emissions can be reduced in an economical manner, but also as an enabler of renewable power by acting as an energy storage method. The results of the energy storage potential have been published in notable journals such as ChemSusChem and Energy Policy. DNV’s demonstration-scale reactor showed the technology to the ARPA-E audience.
DNV is also running a project under the ARPA-e AMPED program in the technology areas of sensing and battery life extension. These topics are relevant as advanced batteries are being deployed in greater volumes across multiple industries, including vehicles, aircraft, ocean vessels, and grid based energy storage.
DNV’s partners in the project include NexTech Materials and Beckett Energy Systems. NexTech is developing a sensor capable of sensing very low concentrations of off gas species that are emitted from batteries when they are damaged or abused. Sourced from the electrolyte solvent, the off gas is traditionally believed to only be emitted during catastrophic failure of the cells. With the NexTech sensor, the proven sensitivity may enable off gas detection much earlier, which can enable new dimensions of cell control and state of health assessment. The project aims to qualify this sensor for detailed analysis of the state of health of the battery, and to incorporate this data into algorithms that predict battery lifetime and provide additional control to battery management systems. The project will deploy the sensor in a community energy storage system with Beckett Energy Systems.
The project is moving forward with testing currently being done at the KEMA Power test facility in Chalfont, PA. Watch this space for updates on how the testing is going!
Coauthor: Principal Researcher Edward Rode for the CO2 utilization project.
As mentioned before in this blog Norway now has a golden opportunity to become the world leader in hybrid and battery ships.
At the battery seminar on 29.01.2013 arranged by DNV, there were 120 participants from Transnova/Norwegian Public Roads Administration, Ministry of the environment, DNV, ZEM, Siemens, and Norwegian ship owners – among others Østensjø, Norled and Eidesvik. There was a lot of useful information about hybrid and battery ships, and the audience learned that there will be three Norwegian hybrid ships in 2013.
The first hybrid ship will be Eidesvik’s Viking Lady that in the FellowSHIP III project, led by DNV, will have a lithium-ion battery package installed this spring. In FellowSHIP II Viking Lady had installed a 330 kW molten carbonate fuel cell and will now be, with the battery and scores of sensors installed, a floating laboratory for new technology in shipping.
Norled is going to build Norway’s first battery ferry, sailing on the Lavik-Oppedal route. To test their soon to be acquired battery technology, Norled will install a battery package on an existing Diesel-electric ferry in 2013. Hopefully and probably they will see that there is a lot to save by having Diesel-electric ferries retrofitted with batteries.
Last, but not least, Østensjø will come with a new building in 2013. The offshore supply vessel Edda Ferd will be a hybrid ship, with batteries and Diesel-electric propulsion. In addition to the batteries, the ship also has variable speed Diesel engines generator sets that are more efficient than constant speed Diesel engines at low loads.
These are exciting times for batteries in shipping and Norway is now taking the lead in developing battery and hybrid ships. Read the press release and DNV’s presentation here.
On January 22nd 2013, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of Norway and Bill Gates attended an open meeting moderated by BBC’s Zeinab Badawi on the topic of “Accelerating progress in Saving Women’s and children’s lives in the coming decade”, at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo. It was a very relaxed atmosphere, and we were seated in the middle of the works of art.
The Global Campaign for the Health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was initiated by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of Norway in 2007. The Campaign brings together a number of actions and initiatives, all aimed at fulfilling the promises given by world leaders in the Millennium Declaration in 2000.
Yesterday, Stoltenberg and Gates discussed whether the MDGs 4 (to improve child mortality by 67%) and 5 (reduce maternal mortality by 75%) will be fulfilled by 2015, as questioned by the United Nations. Stoltenberg said (Gates nodded) that both goals have been met by 40%so far, emphasizing that this significant progress predicts an optimistic future.
They also agreed to that improving health globally cannot happen without working across sectors. Proper involvement with other fields such as providing necessary infrastructure, sanitation, agricultural productivity and education as well as financial services is also vital to ensure success.
Stoltenberg presented an example of how projects to reduce maternal and child mortality has been done: there is a monetary incentive for women in India to deliver their children in clinics rather than at home. Both the global aid industry and local governments need to learn from the private sector, which is focused on efficiency and has the culture of cost-effectiveness. More and better development aid thus needs to be mobilized through partnerships between public and private sectors. One way to coordinate public-private partnerships is to take donor generosity and provide the funding to private companies, so that the scientific results can be made accessible to public. For example, funding pharmaceutical industry to develop new vaccines and make them accessible to the poor. There is actually a measure on how the pharmaceutical industry improves access to medicine worldwide.
This shows the importance of measuring outcomes, as emphasized by Gates. Development of new technologies in Medicine was also mentioned as playing an important role especially for the future of global health.
It is nice to hear that the Prime Minister (and Bill Gates) supports public-private partnerships in achieving global health. Our goal to improve patient safety globally obviously fits well and hopefully will contribute to achieving safer healthcare.
See the whole conversation here
The workshop on Risk Management for Patient Safety that we organized in Brussels proved to be very valuable for our future research on healthcare risk management. Our DNV Health care research programme has been around for a bit more than one year, and I am glad we managed to attract a very diverse high level audience from across Europe.
The goal of the workshop was to establish collaboration between participants like policy makers, clinicians, researchers and industry working on patient safety. We had very fruitful discussions on what is going on in Europe in the field of patient safety and quality improvement, and also on how DNV can contribute to patient safety knowledge and practice.
My colleagues and I presented the early results from the Healthcare Risk Management project, which runs from 2012-2014. It combines the thematic literature review mapping the current use of proactive risk assessment (PRA) in healthcare with a multicentre study in the UK and Norway exploring healthcare professionals’ perceptions of proactive risk assessment. The aim of the first year is to identify which proactive risk assessment (PRA) methods are currently used in healthcare and to evaluate the factors affecting their adoption. The full review looks at the quality of the evidence as well as the learning that can be extracted to support healthcare in its use of PRA for patient safety. Some of the results can be accessed here.
A report of the main outcomes of the workshop is being prepared by Professor Charles Vincent from Imperial college and will be published shortly. In the meantime, have a look at our video from the workshop in Brussels for more information.
Every day around the world thousands of patients are harmed by their healthcare services. Despite the best efforts of clinicians, researchers and policy makers, there is only patchy success in reducing this harm.
The first significant concerns about patient safety started with the publication in 1999 of a report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) titled To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Further on, the Directorate-General for Health and Consumers (DG SANCO) performed a survey in 2008 in the EU member states. It showed some interesting results. 25% of respondents indicated that they had experienced an adverse event in their home country, with the most frequently mentioned being:
• Medication-related events (23%)
• Errors in diagnoses (22%)
• Communication problems (17%)
• Surgery related (12%)
• Medical device related (12%)
Analysis of patient safety incidents shows that reactive or retrospective approaches have been the most frequently used methods in order to understand the causes of harm. Limited use has been made of proactive risk management methods (PRM) that try to identify the potential for adverse events before they happen.
This differs from other safety critical industries. Following major disasters, such as the Aberfan coal slide and the Piper Alpha oil platform explosion, other sectors have made greater improvements by using risk based, safety case approaches.
By using risk-based approaches, these industries ensure they put in place an appropriate number of prevention and mitigation controls relative to the safety threats they face. Whether it is possible to translate such approaches to the healthcare sector is open to debate. Although there are similarities between healthcare and other safety critical industries, there are also important differences in complexity of service provision and sociological dynamics.
In light of the ongoing work on patient safety undertaken by European and international organisations, DNV’s Healthcare Research Program will host a workshop on Risk Management for Patient Safety in Brussels on Wednesday, 21 November. We believe learning from other safety critical industries can be of value, and aim to take stock of what has already been done and to identify further research topics.
Follow the workshop live @DNV #patientsafety and feel free to join the discussion!
There are two competing mechanisms that will eventually make new Li batteries commoditized; prices can drop due to economy of scale and increased market volume, or we extend their useful life and deploy them in applications that utilize their useful energy range to their maximum potential. This is particularly applicable to transportation and grid-based energy storage.
ARPA-e funded DNV project
To the latter end, the ARPA-e AMPED program funds enhanced sensing, modeling, and improved assessment of battery state of health. The DNV project in this program will test a novel sensor from NexTech Materials and validate a demonstration of second life batteries in community energy storage (CES) from Beckett Energy Systems. Testing for the project will be performed at the DNV-KEMA facilities in Chalfont, PA, reinforcing the importance of the DNV-KEMA relationship and its relevance to growing markets. DNV will use the tests with predictive models to validate them as a life assessment tool.
Opportunities in the Automotive sector
The automotive sector is expected to adopt new batteries in 4 – 5 years when the capacity of present batteries is reduced by approximately 20%. For this reason the industry wishes to increase remaining battery value and reduce total cost of EV ownership via 2nd life deployment. DNV’s battery partner ZEM (Zero Emission Mobility) has a pre-project contract from a major OEM to investigate the business case. Provided the case is good and the OEM will proceed in collaboration with ZEM and DNV, advisory and/or product certification/assessment services might emerge.
There are challenges ahead though. Independent vehicle owners enjoy the freedom of using their vehicle whenever they need it, and do not wish to be hampered by battery removal or servicing. Resistance to intervention in driver behavior makes battery swapping schemes difficult to implement. There is hence a need to create non interfering battery exchanges in order to gain access to batteries with known prior usage history. Car lease structures with routine dealer access are the most likely mechanisms. Automotive OEM partnerships such as Nissan-Sumitomo and GM-ABB are investigating this value chain and the involvement of automakers implies that access to batteries throughout vehicle life may be part of the future business model for OEMs. If these battery value chains are viable, prior data will be available. If not, there is still a need for technologies that can evaluate battery health without prior history. DNV is working in both areas.
Second life batteries in Energy Storage Systems
In energy storage applications, the reliability requirements are very high. Energy storage systems serve the function of increasing grid reliability but more importantly, safety is imperative because community energy storage (CES) systems are located within neighborhoods or public areas. Therefore 2nd life batteries may represent a safety risk and must be characterized as if they are a new chemistry with lower safety limits.
The deliverables from the DNV ARPA-e project will demonstrate the use of 2nd life batteries in energy storage applications while also validating the off gas sensor. This demonstration will qualify a new sensing technology that has the potential to improve the safety of these systems. This work will parallel a Transnova-funded project where DNV’s Technology Qualification methodology is applied to type-qualification of battery systems for maritime applications.
In 2009, DNV began investing in research for energy storage and batteries. In collaboration with KEMA and Maritime business units and by leveraging investments in research with partners such as ZEM, DNV is making an impact in batteries and energy storage.
This blog post was co-written by Narve Mjøs, Director of Services Development,CC&ES Business Build, DNV KEMA and Davion Hill, Senior Researcher at DNV Research & Innovation. Download their position paper to learn more on the topic.
Fuel cell technology proves successful in a new position paper from DNV Research and Innovation, giving hope to a future of reduced emissions from shipping.
The position paper describes the ground breaking FellowSHIP project: A pilot project employing marine fuel cell technology of a magnitude never before seen in a merchant vessel. The main project achievement was to reduce emissions: the CO2 emissions were reduced due to the fact that fuel cells are more efficient than combustion engines; there were no particulate matter emitted; no SOx emissions; and no NOx emissions.
Click here to read the position paper describing, among other things, the 330 kW Molten Carbonate Fuel cell installation on the Viking Lady
The position paper describes the ground breaking FellowSHIP project in more detail. We discuss the present state of art of marine fuel cells, comparing different technologies, and we give our views on the future of fuel cells for ships. An important part for ship owners and ship builders is a description of the DNV class rules for fuel cell power on ships.
Although fuel cell technology is not new, the success of FellowSHIP means that it has become relevant to discuss the potential for fuel cell technology in on-board applications and the current status of the technology.
DNV has paved the way for safe and smooth introduction of fuel cells for ships. We recognise that it will take time before fuel cells can become a realistic on-board alternative, mostly restricted by costs, but the FellowSHIP project has taken some important first steps towards a future for fuel cells on ships.
Oil price down to $85 thanks to shale oil ?
Shale oil, Oil shale, shale gas, Gas-To-Liquids, liquid plays…. there seems to be great confusion when referring to unconventional oil and gas terminology including at least but not last from the journal Nature (see picture below). Unconventional gas, like shale gas has disrupted the natural gas sector in the last few years and it seems unconventional oil could be the next reason for oil price to go down (see video above). It is therefore important to know which resources we are talking about when addressing unconventional oil and gas issues. We will humbly take the role of judge, jury and executioner when it comes to the terms to be used in the unconventional oil and gas sector (with some help from Schlumberger, Total and other stakeholders). Indeed, DNV is involved in the unconventional gas and unconventional oil sectors and speaking the same language among stakeholders is crucial.
We can do this because the only truth in the Oil&Gas sector is that unfortunately nothing is certain… there is no perfect definition of unconventional gas nor there is one for unconventional oil. In addition, over time, as economic and technological conditions evolve, what was considered unconventional can migrate into the conventional category and new unconventional categories may even appear. It is to note that from a legal perspective (permitting), there is no distinction between conventional and unconventional hydrocarbons and the difference between gaseous and liquid products does not even matter as they are usually addressed as “hydrocarbons”. In France or China shale gas is defined as a type of mineral resource. Below are what is mostly considered unconventional gas and unconventional oil.
- Coalbed Methane (CBM) aka coalbed gas, coal mine methane (CMM) or coal seam gas (CSG)
- Tight gas is considered conventional in some regions like China
- Biogas is considered as unconventional gas by GL Noble Denton and Synthetic Natural Gas (SNG) from biomass could also be considered unconventional gas
- Gas hydrates (aka Methane clathrate, methane hydrate, hydromethane, methane ice, fire ice or natural gas hydrate) is considered an unconventional gas resource by Statoil
- Sour gas
- Arctic gas: the Arctic is not an oil region, it is a gas region with natural gas representing >75% of these remaining untaped hydrocarbon reserves
- Deepwater gas (>900 meters depth) and Ultra-deepwater gas (>2100 m) exploration activities are allowing access to new gas reserves
Historically natural gas has been a by-product of oil production so for oil producers, everything that is not liquid at ambient temperature and pressure is considered “natural gas”. This is methane, Natural Gas Liquids (NGLs), helium, CO2, hydrogen etc. However demand for natural gas has increased and the emergence of natural gas champions operating globally has made natural gas a valuable commodity traded worldwide. Moreover the development and use of new natural gas extraction techniques like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has allowed to tape into new natural gas resources like shale gas making oil and NGLs the by-products this time. In the US, because of low gas prices, these by-products have actually became an important source of revenues and the increase in oil/liquid production from shale gas projects is now impacting the US domestic oil production (se picture below). In many cases horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are only applied to the wet windows of shale plays in order to produce oil/NGLs since drilling for gas is not worth it anymore.
This shale oil (aka tight oil, or Light Tight Oil LTO) is part of the unconventional oil family
- Oil sands (aka tar sands)
- Extra Heavy Oil (aka Heavy crude oil)
- Tight Oil (aka Light Tight Oil, LTO, shale oil)
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has a very peculiar definition of unconventional oil where it includes both different types of oil formations as well as processes that can produce liquids from alternative feedstocks (GTL, CTL see picture below). This classification adds process-related confusion where people confuse processes with fuels to the already existing confusion between, natural gas formations and locations.
To summarize, shale oil IS NOT oil shale and GTL is a process, not a resource or a fuel. One could think about a definition of unconventional oil and gas based on risk expenditures or RISKEX™. Indeed, unconventional and conventional oil and gas projects differ principally in risk exposure (e.g. use of new vs. proven technology) so by using a RISKEX™ based approach and treating risk explicitly they could be put on the same scale and more easily compared.