Eni Sees Kashagan to Produce 75,000 bopd First Month

ROME - Eni SpA expects the much-delayed Kashagan field in Kazakstan to start producing before October and to average 75,000 barrels a day the first month and twice that within three months, a senior official of the Italian energy company said Friday.

Claudio Descalzi, head of the exploration and production division, said ENI expects output to soar in the second half of 2014. In the third quarter of next year, it will reach 370,000 barrels a day on average, he said at a press conference in Rome after a shareholders meeting.

Output will "certainly" start by the end of September, the deadline agreed with Kazak authorities, he said, adding that it may start as early as July. Earlier this year, the Italian company said it expected to start pumping in June.

The Kashagan project, which includes large oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Total SA, is years behind initial schedule, with cost overruns in the billions of dollars.

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Lundin Expects to Produce up to 38,000 boepd in 2013

Sweden's Lundin Petroleum said Monday that it expects to produce between 33,000 and 38,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boepd) per day during 2013.

Releasing an update on its 2P reserves, Lundin CEO Ashley Heppenstall said that the firm expects to exit 2013 with a production rate of 40,000 boepd after its Brynhild field, offshore Norway, comes on stream later this year.

Lundin's 2P reserves are now 201.5 million barrels of oil equivalent, which is down from the 210.7 million barrels reported for the end of 2011. The firm said its 2P reserves have been positively affected by its Bertam field, offshore Malaysia, which has been added to the figure. Further increases resulted from Lundin's main producing assets – the Alvheim and Volund fields, offshore Norway – as well as the Brynhild field.

However, Lundin pointed out that these additions were offset by reserves reductions predominantly on the Gaupe gas/condensate field offshore Norway and producing assets in the Komi Republic in northern Russia.

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Colorado-based group helping Nepal produce more crops with human urine

Himalayan villagers plant marigolds in their noses to mask the odor of urine in collection tanks. (Photos courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

For 14 years, a foundation based in the one-stoplight town of Ridgway, on the Western Slope, has been helping rural villagers in eastern Nepal with education, building and employment projects. Now, the dZi Foundation has drawn widespread attention for what it has Himalayan villagers doing with urine.

Human urine has turned out to be the key to more diverse and more abundant vegetable crops in a remote area where subsistence farming has been the norm for generations. More conventional fertilizers have not been an option in communities that are five-day walks from the nearest roads.

So the dZi Foundation teamed up with a Himalayan development organization and started a project that is moving villagers beyond the crude outhouses that long have served the remote farming areas. The foundation persuaded more than 1,000 households in the communities of Sotang and Gudel to replace their "pig toilets." The name comes from the fact that outhouses were built over pig pens so that waste could drop directly to the waiting, hungry pigs. The waste was a big part of the swines' diet — and also a health hazard.

"We can laugh about this, but the sanitation issues were pretty bad," said dZi board chairman Darvin Ayre of Boulder. "Getting rid of the pig toilets was a first step, then we realized we could use urine on crops."

DZi, named after an etched stone bead believed to bestow health on its wearer, switched many villagers to dual-hole toilets that separate solid waste and urine. The urine collects in a tank, and the nitrogen-rich liquid is left to off-gas for a month. It's diluted and dispersed to fields using a drip system.

It is delivered directly to the soil, not put on edible parts of plants that grow on elaborately terraced fields and in new greenhouses that dZi also helped to build.

This new form of fertilizer has allowed farmers to grow new crops such as tomatoes, cauliflower and cabbage that traditionally did not do well or had not been tried there.

"This is a matter of maximizing what they have," said dZi co-founder and president Jim Nowak of the use of urine as well as the many other ways the foundation has been working to revitalize villages from the ground up.

DZi's urine project recently was featured in Scientific American in an article that found use of human urine on farm crops has been spreading slowly worldwide in the past decade. In addition to the Nepalese use of it, urine is

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