March 19, 2018
“You may delay, but time will not”, Benjamin Franklin.
After the euphoria of being awarded an Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre Grant, the hard work begins; the governance, management and financial structures are embedded, the research and stakeholder management programs are established, staff and students are recruited and the activities begin.
Two years into the activities and the weeks are full of research outcomes, industry and government stakeholder engagement, student classes, industry workshops, experiments, equipment procurement and setup, publication outputs, student achievements, prizes and awards, conferences, industry placements and mentoring.
How much of this can be achieved in one week, this article takes a snapshot and look back on last week:
The West Australian picked up on one of our researcher’s recent publications where it was found that an ion assumed present by Chemistry textbooks and in the solutions used for industrial extractive processing, doesn’t actually exist and an Alston cheeky cartoon explains the rest.
The Australian Centre for LNG Futures Facility’s first stakeholder framing session to establish the critical elements of a new production facility for research, training and product testing was held at the beginning of the week. This session not only provided key stakeholders the opportunity to input on design, it provided critical learning elements for the students that assisted in the process.
Engaging with the oil and gas industry at the Australasian Oil and Gas Expo 2018, provided contractors, vendors and start-ups an opportunity to find out more about the Centre and we took the opportunity to promote our upcoming courses on LNG Production and Gas Processing later in the year. With over 8000 visitors, this event provides a targeted engagement opportunity for academic staff and students promoting the Centre’s activities.
A public lecture delivered by visiting Professor Brent Young from University of Auckland and VMGSim Associate, “Small computers to big data, oil and gas and beyond: a brief history of dynamic simulation and state of art case studies” was enjoyed by industry and academic colleagues who took advantage of Brent’s visit to Perth this week.
We hosted visitors from Poland’s Gaz-System in our extensive Gas Processing laboratories creating the opportunity for further international partners. We look forward to working with them in the future.
We attended the UK Department for International Trade AOG 2018 Sundowner and engaged with the visiting staff from the UK Oil and Gas Technology Centre. ACLNGF professors have strong relationships with a number of organisations in the UK, including Imperial College London and Cambridge University.
Science Meets Parliament in Western Australia, an important opportunity for us to discuss the Centres developments pertinent to the State’s future workforce and economic growth.
And every week, there is our Friday Forum, where postdoctoral staff present their latest research, students present to their peers on their PhD research progress and students report back on lab safety audits and improvements that support a good communal research environment.
All of this in one week takes your breath away and so we roll into the next week, with new activities, new industry and government engagements and new research proposals; this Centre is a humming hive of activity underpinning Australia’s vast oil and gas endowment. To get involved, visit our website, but if you would like to engage at a deeper level by offering a PhD industry placement or research activity, please contact us at lngfutures-fems@uwa.edu.au addressing your email to Professor Eric May, Centre Director.
