Originally posted on June 2, 2006 @ 9:17 am
With oil prices hovering around $70 a barrel, a French company will use a supercomputing system, with 113 teraflops of capacity, to compete against a Houston company in a quest for hidden oil.
According to a news report IBM will be deploying Europe’s most powerful seismic supercomputer to help Compagnie Generale de Geophysique search for oil in dead zones, such as salt domes. The system will include IBM’s dual-core JS21 blades and will be the first major implementation of the new 64-bit UNIX blade. That is going to be a really fast machine.
I had no idea that oil could be trapped under salt domes but doing some research I found out some very interesting things about salt domes and how they trap oil.
I wonder how long it will take to actually get the oil and make use of it? Gas prices are crazy and they don’t seem to be going down.
A friend of mine has started running biodiesel which is great for the environment. It even made his car run a little more smoothly.
What’s so great about biodiesel you ask? Biodiesel contains no petroleum, but it can be blended at any level with petroleum diesel to create a biodiesel blend. It can be used in compression-ignition (diesel) engines with little or no modifications. Biodiesel is simple to use, biodegradable, nontoxic, and essentially free of sulfur and aromatics.
The only drawback is biodiesel costs a lot to make and I only know of one gas station in my local area that sells it. The price is actually very close to normal gas prices but it is better for Mother Earth.