Islam M. Rafiq - Green petroleum: how oil and gas can be environmentally sustainable

Green Petroleum

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Copyright 2012 by Scrivener Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Islam, Rafiqul, 1959
Green petroleum: how oil and gas can be environmentally sustainable/M.R. Islam. - 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-07216-5 (hardback)
1. Petroleum engineering. 2. Gas engineering. 3. Petroleum engineering-Environmental aspects. 4. Sustainable engineering. 5. Environmental protection. I. Title.
TN870.I834 2012
665.50286-dc23
2012007304

ISBN 978-1-118-07216-5

Preface

An earlier volume entitled The Greening of Petroleum Operations (Wiley-Scrivener, 2011), by the same group of authors as the present work, has been well-received in various sectors of the contemporary engineering profession. At the same time, its appeal is inherently limited by the required principal focus on the concerns and practical preoccupations of working petroleum engineers and the postgraduate-level research community. In the current volume, the authors recap the main lines of argument of that earlier work, paying greater attention to its general line and method. With a view to further enriching the formation and developing outlook of undergraduate engineering students, the authors have accordingly adjusted the focus away from the detail about the actual engineering and its associated analytical methods, tests, and criteria, and more onto the broad principles of contemporary scientific investigation and data analysis.

We believe this to be a worthy development, and welcome this opportunity to say why we think this is so, and so necessary at this particular time. To illuminate the point, a Google search was conducted on the phrase medical science versus old-wives-tales and home cures. The overwhelming majority of hits argued thus: old-wives-tales and home remedies have long been a hit-or-miss affair because they largely lack the backing of sound modern science, yet somehow, despite everything, some of these seem actually to work FULL STOP! That is, while the vast majority of hits grudgingly acknowledge some truth lurking in old-wives-tales, this is coupled with a pro forma ritual obeisance to the authority of modern science and its methods. At the same time, however, nothing, absolutely nothing, is said or even hinted about redirecting deployment of any of these hallowed modern scientific methods to establish why some of these home remedies and old-wives-tales in particular could possibly work, and establishing exactly why modern science could have missed seeing this before. Thus, what we actually have here is not the joining of a common search for knowledge of the truth between forces armed with very different kinds of authority, but something else actually quite disturbing. What we have here on display are voices echoing the highest levels of the medical-scientific establishment desperate to maintain not only their grip but especially their aura of superiority and authority over all other approaches to knowledge. Instead of deploying scientific and consensus-building methods to resolve the contradictions and move society forward, these differences are quasi-criminalized as some kind of threat to established authority, hyped and distorted to the point of anarchy, and this anarchy is then raised to the level of authority by those elements from the establishment that feel the threat most palpably: you are either with us, or with the forces of Darkness and Ignorance

In the current Information Age, it has become more transparent and more undeniable than ever before that the truth-content of knowledge has nothing to do with so-called authority. The essence of any deed, including the deed of the kinds of research brought together in these and companion volumes of this series, is intention. Hewing closely to that principle, the authors of these volumes explicitly repudiate the idea that the products of honestly-intended scientific investigation must ever be the monopoly of some aristocracy, natural or otherwise, of intellectual or other talent. Let the most rabid defenders and perpetrators of New Science prejudice continue their hollow rejections and dismissals of everything scientific learned before Newton as fanciful, speculative, and inexact. In the sheer breadth of sources and insights drawn upon, ranging from the social and natural sciences, history and even religion, this volume and its predecessor serve to demonstrate why the merited insights of all honestly-intended investigations into the natural order, without reference to the social or political or intellectual standing of their source, must always be welcomed by all those engaged in the quest for meaningful knowledge.