1. TO UNDERTAKE MARKET RESEARCH TO MAKE INFORMED ASSESSMENTS OF THE PRODUCT & SERVICES This involves engaging with end-users within the known market sector of oil & gas: BP and Chevron have agreed to supply samples (reservoir cores) to test the performance of the new device against well characterised samples; M-I SWACO have already expressed interest and Saudi Aramco will be approached via existing contacts. The stakeholders will primarily be approached for assistance in developing and refining the IP in the following ways: - What are the needs of the end-users in terms of features and functionality and final analysis reporting of clay hydration and drilling fluid analysis? This will help us realise the full scope of a product/service that can be considered competitive in the market we intend to address. - What are their current methods for initial hydration tests of wellbore material and drilling fluid effectiveness? This information will allow us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of our existing IP. - Can they confirm that there is a market need for our IP? 2. TO RESEARCH COMPETITORS FOR BOTH TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING STRATEGY This research will involve: - A technological analysis on the available competitor products to determine key areas of scientific development which can be incorporated into our product designs. This will also expose the risks involved with building a more advanced product. - An investigation into the analysis techniques used to extract useful information from the data of the instruments. This will enable us to develop a standardised reporting format which will great increase efficiency and effectiveness of our IP. - Market strategy analysis which will shed light on competitor strength of brand, distribution strength, market reputation, breadth of product and technical support. This will allow us to develop the IP to a point where it can offer benefits over competing solutions. The starting point for the research is a competitor GRACE's instruments with which R. Patel (the researcher) and contacts in M-I SWACO have direct experience. Access to other competitor products will be made via BP and Chevron. 3. TO INVESTIGATE OTHER POTENTIAL MARKETS Although the driving market use for our IP is oil & gas exploration, the measurements that can be made using our IP are applicable to a broader market. There has been interest from existing contacts in hydrogen storage company, Cella Energy looking to measure expansion of their materials in water at high pressure and temperature, as well as UCL Physics. Any discipline where expansion of a material is measured over time in contact with water and other fluid chemicals can be approached. We will explore existing contacts within the food and pharmaceutical materials industry, as we believe these are another market for out IP. It is therefore imperative that these relationships are built and maintained to optimise the position of our IP within the overall market. 4. TO PERFORM ASSESSMENT OF MARKET OPPORTUNITY AND COMPETITORS TO BUILD COMMERCIALISATION STRATEGY & ROUTE TO MARKET This work will be performed by external consultancy, Woodview Technology Limited, who have considerable expertise in technology development for the energy industry (see Letter of Support). Alongside our existing contacts with end-users, they will engage with their own, larger network of supply chain companies who might be potential customers of our IP. This will broaden our network and develop a better informed strategy for commercialisation. Woodview Technology Ltd will address the following points: - Perform a market and IP analysis to aid in the development of a licencing agreement for partners to buy into the technology. - Investigate opportunities for patenting the IP. - Investigate viability of providing IP as a product or service. - Develop a route to market strategy, involving liable future activities, risks, etc

Our over-arching aim is to better understand the impact of powerful submarine flows, called turbidity currents, on pipelines and other seabed infrastructure used to recover oil and gas. Turbidity currents pose a serious hazard to expensive seabed installations, especially in deeper-water settings. These sediment flows are particularly hazardous because they can be exceptionally powerful (travelling at speeds of up to 20 m/s), and can flow for long distances (100s km), causing damage over vast areas of seafloor. Even weaker flows travelling at ~1-2 m/s can severely damage seafloor equipment, or break strategically important submarine telecommunication cables, while some flows have maintained speeds in excess of 5 m/s for hundreds of kilometres. This makes hazard mitigation by local re-routing of pipelines difficult. Where seafloor topography is rugged, many operators route pipelines within canyons; however, these are focal points for turbidity current activity. Mitigating against turbidity current geohazards, particularly within canyons, can have very significant cost implications for industry - additional deepwater pipeline routing costs ~ $3 million per km. Mitigation costs of $2 billion are predicted to route pipelines under the Congo Canyon, where turbidity current hazard is deemed to be high. Perhaps just as importantly, pipeline oil spills could lead to major reputational damage. Given concern over accidents to structures used to recover oil and gas, a focus on geohazards is also aligned with NERC's environmental responsibility. The most remarkable aspect of turbidity currents is how few direct measurements there are from flows, in part because they damage monitoring equipment placed on the seafloor. Several lines of evidence point to the existence of a region of high sediment concentration at the base of turbidity currents. These dense basal layers are of key important because of: (i) their location just above the bed where most submarine infrastructure is located; and (ii) they carry most momentum due to their large density. Yet, sediment concentration has never been measured directly measured in these layers. Physical experiments, numerical modeling and ancient deposits provide valuable insights into these flows; but there is a compelling need to monitor full-scale flows in action. This project is timely because it will develop innovative field-based techniques for imaging near bed flow structure and vertical changes in sediment concentration in situ. Aims: (1) Our first aim is to develop and field test a novel technique for remote sensing of dense near bed layers. (2) Our second aim is to better understand the nature of near bed dense layers. (3) Our third aim is to embed improved understanding of dense near-bed layers into numerical models used by industry to assess impact of turbidity currents on oil and gas pipelines. (4) The project will also help to establish an international centre of excellence for submarine geohazard research at the UK National Oceanography Centre. Here we propose to make direct measurements of dense basal layers that form part of the turbidity currents occuring daily during the elevated summer river discharge on the Squamish Delta, located in Howe Sound, Canada. We will use an innovative four-point mooring to hold a vessel and suspended instrumentation payload stable above an active channel system, while we observe the dense basal layer with a Chirp sub-bottom profiler. The low frequency and broad bandwidth (1.5 -13.0 kHz) Chirp source guarantees penetration through dense near-bed layers, resolving layers with ~10 cm resolution. These field observations will help to understand the fundamental character of near bed layers, and the situations in which they form.

To enhance ultimate recovery of hydrocarbon gases from unconventional gas resources such as shales, we need to uncover the non-intuitive gas transport mechanisms in ultra-tight porous media. Exploiting our previous and recent pioneering work in modelling rarefied gas flows at micro/nano-scales and in pore-scale characterisation of reservoir rocks, we present an ambitious project to tackle this newly-emerged research challenge through developing direct numerical simulation models and techniques that work on binarised images of concerned porous materials. This work will transform the currently-adopted heuristic approaches, i.e. Darcy-like laws and pore network modelling, into those underpinned by the first principle, and enable the quantification of prediction uncertainty on gas transport associated with the former approaches. Timely support now from EPSRC will provide us crucial resources to shape this emerging research area - understanding and quantifying gas flow physics in ultra-tight porous media.

Subsea infrastructure networks underpin our daily lives, providing critical global communication links and supporting our demand for energy supplies. These strategically important networks are vulnerable to fast-moving seafloor flows of sediment, known as turbidity currents. Such flows have previously broken important subsea cable connections; leading to £Ms in lost financial trading and repair costs. The seafloor cable network transfers >95% of all global communications traffic. The International Cable Protection Committee (represented by partner Carter) has a vested interest in understanding the risk of turbidity currents, but there is a paucity of direct field measurements of turbidity currents. Thus, numerical models are largely based on scaled down experimental studies. Here, we show how the first deep-ocean high resolution measurements of turbidity currents can enable improved understanding of the risk posed, through calibration of numerical models for impact analysis. This will directly benefit partners Chevron and Shell, who are responsible for ensuring safe operation of multi-£M seafloor oil and gas pipelines worldwide. Loss of hydrocarbons to the environment can have severe environmental and reputational implications; hence minimising the risk of a pipe rupture is important. Improvements to modelling will be immediately taken up by partner HR Wallingford, who advise a wide range of owners and stakeholders on hazard assessment for seafloor infrastructure. We aim to address the following questions: [1] How can emerging direct monitoring technology lead to a step-change in assessment of turbidity current risk to offshore infrastructure? Until recently, there were no direct measurements of turbidity currents due to the difficulties in deployment in remote and challenging subsea environments. New advances in technology have enabled the first measurements of velocity and concentration in deep-ocean turbidity currents. Techniques developed for, and lessons learned from, the monitoring of flows at a number of sites will be transferred to industry partners. This first aim is thus to help improve how industry assesses turbidity current hazards by using the first ever direct measurements. [2] How appropriate are existing models and how should they be revised based on new field-scale calibrations? As no comparable datasets exist, this new direct monitoring provides a unique opportunity to validate, test and refine numerical models of turbidity current. We will first assess how appropriate existing flows employed by industry are at recreating real flow behaviour. We will then run variants of a depth-resolved model developed by Dorrell. The aim is to provide a modelling approach that is acceptable in terms of computational cost, and that can recreate observations from direct monitoring. Specific guidance will be provided to the partners on how models should be developed to assess impact of turbidity currents on seafloor infrastructure. [3] What impact do real-world turbidity currents have on seafloor infrastructure? We will then quantify turbidity current impact on a range of seafloor infrastructure. This is novel because it will involve the application of new models based on the first deep-sea direct monitoring data. The analysis will transform industry understanding of impacts and mitigation strategies. Deliverables will include: (i) Report outlining industry best practice for turbidity current hazard assessment; (ii) New numerical modelling approach outlined in a workshop; (iii) Summary report detailing the modelled impacts of real-world turbidity currents on a range of seafloor infrastructure, and guidance for design, mitigation measures and future data acquisition strategies. Project cost = £87.2k (at 80% FEC) over 12 months.

This project is an opportunity to harness the synergy between world-leading scientists from four prestigious institutions to create the next generation modelling tools for complex multiphase flows. These flows are central to micro-fluidics, virtually every processing and manufacturing technology, oil-and-gas and nuclear applications, and biomedical applications such as lithotripsy and laser-surgery cavitation. The ability to predict the behaviour of multiphase flows reliably will address a major challenge of tremendous economic, scientific, and societal benefit to the UK. The Programme will achieve this goal by developing a single modelling framework that establishes, for the first time, a transparent linkage between input (models and/or data) and prediction; this will allow systematic error-source identification, and, therefore, directed, optimal, model-driven experimentation, to maximise prediction accuracy. The framework will also feature optimal selection of massively-parallelisable numerical methods, capable of running efficiently on 10^5-10^6 core supercomputers, optimally-adaptive, three-dimensional resolution, and the most sophisticated multi-scale physical models. This framework will offer unprecedented resolution of multi-scale, multiphase phenomena, minimising the reliance on correlations and empiricism. The investigators' synergy, and their long-standing industrial collaborations, will ensure that this Programme will result in a paradigm-shift in multiphase flow research worldwide. We will demonstrate our capabilities in two areas of strategic importance to the UK: by providing insights into novel manufacturing processes, and reliable prediction of multiphase flow regime transitions in the oil-and-gas industry. Our framework will be sufficiently general to address a number of other industrial and environmental global challenges, which we detail herein.