"GLOBAL OIL DEMAND GROWTH MAY SLIP TO 1.2mb/D IN 2016: IEA"

 

World oil demand growth appears to have peaked in the first quarter at 1.8 mb/d and will continue to ease throughout the rest of 2015 and into 2016 as temporary support fades.

Global oil demand growth is forecast to slow to 1.2 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2016, from an average 1.4 mb/d this year, though strong consumption is expected in non-OECD Asia, according to the IEA Oil Market Report for July.

World oil demand growth appears to have peaked in the first quarter at 1.8 mb/d and will continue to ease throughout the rest of 2015 and into 2016 as temporary support fades, IEA said.

Global oil supply surged by 550 000 barrels per day (550 kb/d) in June, on higher output from both OPEC and non-OPEC producers. At 96.6 mb/d, world oil production was an impressive 3.1 mb/d higher than a year earlier, with OPEC crude and natural gas liquids accounting for 60% of the gain.

Non-OPEC supply growth is expected to grind to a halt in 2016, as lower oil prices and spending cuts take a toll.

OPEC crude supply rose by 340 kb/d in June to 31.7 mb/d, a three- year high, led by record high output from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. OPEC output stood 1.5 mb/d above the previous year. The “call on OPEC crude and stock change” for 2016 is forecast to rise by 1 mb/d to 30.3 mb/d.

OECD industry inventories hit a record of 2 876 mb in May, up by a steep 38 mb. Product holdings led the build-up and by end-month covered 30.7 days of forward demand. Global supply and demand balances suggest that the rate of global stock increases, quickened rapidly to an astonishing 3.3 mb/d during the second quarter.

Robust margins spurred stronger than expected OECD refinery runs, lifting second quarter global throughput estimates to 78.7 mb/d. Global refinery throughputs are forecast to increase by further 0.7 mb/d in the third quarter, with annual gains shifting to the non-OECD. New capacity start-ups in 2015 and 2016 will put margins under pressure.

"THE NEW GOOGLE TRENDS: BOTH AN AMAZING RESEARCH TOOL AND AMUSING RABBIT HOLE"

When Google launched its redesigned Google Trends site back in June, you might have thought that it was aimed as a tool primarily for journalists, bloggers, and students. And, you may be right in guessing this. But, you are missing out on a great exploratory tool if you aren’t in any of those categories and decided not to explorer the updated Google Trends.

The first thing you’ll notice are the three “featured stories” going across near the top of your browser window. Selecting one of these featured stories leads you to a new page that provides categories of in-depth information. These categories may include news stories, a list of people pertinent to the story, information about geographical differences in interest about the story, a time line of interest, and a list of related topics.

A list of “trending stories” followed the featured stories. These are generally newsworthy stories that have developed in the past 24 hours and are continuing to generate search interest. Selecting a news item from the list of trending stories results in an in-depth page too.

However, you aren’t limited to Google’s featured and trending stories. You can search for any topic or set of topics that have generated sufficient search interest for Google to produce meaningful related information. With Microsoft Windows 10 set for release in just a few weeks on July 29, 2015, it seemed like a good topic to throw to Google Trends. I tried few of the Google Trends story tuning options for this search. First, I limited the search region to just the United States instead of the default region of the entire world. Next, I reduced the time frame to searches in the past 12 months. The default is to consider all searches since 2004. And, finally, I selected the checkbox to turn on indications of news stories about Windows 10 during this period. I could have also narrowed the categories of sources and the type of sources (web search, image search, news search, Google shopping, and YouTube search).

You should be careful on how you interpret Google Trends’ output, however. For example, in the screenshot above, you can see: I once again restricted searches for the past 12 month period in the United States and then searched on the words “football”, “basketball”, and “baseball”. If you don’t think it through (as I failed to do), you might believe that the search for “football” might be mainly about American Football instead of what the rest of the world refers to as Football and we in the U.S. call soccer. Then, like me, you’d be wrong because based on the news stories associated with the search, at least some of the searchers for “football” are about soccer.

Google doesn’t restrict the kind of terms you can use for trend searches. In this final screenshot, you can see: I searched for the words blue, red, yellow, and green. You can see from the chart that the colour pair of blue-red started out relatively close in search interest in 2004 as did the pair of yellow-green. However, over the years, the word “red” appears to be in significantly more searches than blue. And, the search for yellow and green has bifurcated over the years too. Why this is the case is for a much more in-depth research than I conducted. I think though, it shows the kind of questions that can arise from what may have started as a playful or even apparently nonsensical searches. Google Trends can be both a tremendous research tool or a amusing rabbit hole to wander through.

"GOOGLE CHROME MULTILINGUAL SPELLCHECK FEATURE IN THE WORKS"

It’s common for most of us in India to use multiple languages. And that just created a whole new language – Hinglish. Similarly, millions use multiple languages simultaneously as they type.

However, spell check technologies have been limited, enabling just one language at a time. You could either switch to one language, or add words from the other language to your dictionary. Mobile devices, on the other hand, have been more adaptive in their learning of user response. Google Chrome might just change all of it.

According to a report in 9to5 google, “in Chrome dev version 45.0.2453.0 released yesterday, a ‘developer channel’ build of the browser with changes and features that are still in their early development stages and as such not yet ready to be downloaded by the masses, the ability to enable spellchecking in Chrome against multiple languages caught our eye in the official changelog for the release, particularly as its a feature the community has been begging for in frustrated Chromium issue tracker threads dating back to 2008 when the Google-centric browser was released.”

Since these are still developer builds, it will take some time for this feature to become a default feature in the Chrome browser. Also, the multilingual spellcheck function will be restricted to Windows and Linux.

The report adds, “Don’t get overly excited, though – even if the feature does make it to the stable, public release version of the browser, it’s going to take some more time, and there are some other caveats. In an email from Julius Alexander IV, the developer at Google spearheading this functionality’s completion, Alexander says that “only the UI portion of this feature is done for now,” so clicking the UI buttons in the right-click menu to switch between languages won’t actually change the language used by Chrome for spellchecking. He also added that there’s no plan for it to ever work on Mac OS X because Chrome on OS X uses the operating system’s system-wide spellchecking tool, not the one built natively into Chrome.”

"EVAPORATION ENGINES USING ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES MADE FROM BACTERIA"

A team of researchers from US have created evaporation-driven engines that can power common tasks like locomotion and electricity generation. These engines start and run autonomously when placed at air–water interfaces. They are made from biologically inspired artificial muscles which respond to humidity fluctuations.

Doesn’t evaporation take too long for any reasonable device?

Evaporation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the natural environment and a dominant form of energy transfer in the Earth’s climate. Engineered systems rarely use naturally occurring evaporation as a source of energy, despite a vast number of examples in the biological world. The potential of evaporation to power engineered systems is largely neglected. Furthermore, normal evaporation time scales (daily / weekly) are too slow to use for everyday devices, yet the process carries a significant amount of energy.

The breakthrough here is that near the evaporating surfaces, there exists spatial gradients in relative humidity which provides a potential opportunity to exploit. By confining water to the nanoscale, in specially designed hydroscopic materials, it’s possible to convert energy from evaporation to mechanical work. The confinement induces large pressures in response to changing relative humidity. Scaling this phenomena up to macroscopic (real-world) devices has faced many problems in the past, but the team have managed to overcome a number of them here.

Their solution: Artificial muscles from bacteria

By using cleverly modified naturally occurring bacteria, the team of researchers created hygroscopy-driven artificial muscles (HYDRA’s) that exhibit strong hydration-driven actuation. The HYDRA’s can be thought of as muscle-like elastic bands that contract and expand under changes in humidity.

The material is made from plastic tape coated with a micrometer-thick bacterial spore layer. This layer is formed with modified Bacillus subtilis spores, missing most of their outer protein protective layers. These films change curvature as a function of relative humidity, and dramatic changes in the overall length of tapes occur in humid and dry conditions. The tapes can lift weight against gravity in dry conditions, which is conceptually a remarkable feat for just bacteria-covered tape!

Assembling several tapes as a stack (while leaving air gaps) allows rapid moisture transport to and from the spores, resulting in a material that can be scaled in two dimensions, without compromising hydration/dehydration kinetics.

Engines from artificial muscles

They next thought is that if a small portion of the power generated by the spores could be used to control the evaporation rate or, alternatively, move the spores in and out of the high humidity zone at the surface, the relative humidity experienced by the spores would change rapidly in a cyclical fashion – analogous to a primitive mechanical engine. This is exactly what the team did, and created two types of macroscale evaporation-driven engines to prove the concept: an oscillatory and rotary engine. These engines start and run autonomously when placed at air–water interfaces.

When the water on the surface naturally evaporates, the engine interior becomes slightly more humid, and the HYDRA’s expand. By using many HYDRA’s in combination and connecting them to a small electromagnetic generator, their movement is converted into mechanical energy in which it could drives the engine. The engines are able to power an electricity generator to light up LEDs and drive a miniature car as the water evaporates.

Impressive Performance

When loaded with increasing weight, the range of motion of the artificial muscles reduces, but remains significant even at load weights 50x more than the strips. The estimated work density of the entire strip is 17 J / kg, which is close to mammalian skeletal muscles.

Evaporation-driven engines may find many ‘off-the-grid’ applications in powering things such as robotic systems, sensors, devices and machinery that require function in the natural environment. Furthermore, the researchers suggest the efficiency of the material (which is currently only a few percent), can be drastically improved with further work on the spore design. If achieved, it’s hard to see why this technology won’t be heavily utilized, especially because the material is cheap and the building blocks (spores) are naturally occurring. Places where access to electricity is limited to non-exist, would find this technology truly magnificent.

"TELEPHONE CONNECTIONS IN INDIA SURPASS ONE BILLION: TRAI"

 

The total number of telephone connections in the country crossed the record one billion mark in May, bolstered by growth in number of mobile users.

At the end of May, the total number of telephone connections stood at 1,002.05 million, of which 975.78 million connections were wireless or mobile, data released by regulator TRAI showed today.

The number of connections per 100 persons stood at 79.67 at the end of May. However, the subscriber data is not entirely comparable with the population of the country as many people have multiple connections.

“The number of telephone subscribers in India increased from 999.71 million at the end of April 2015 to 1,002.05 million at the end of May 2015, thereby showing a monthly growth rate of 0.23 percent,” TRAI said.

Of the total wireless subscriber base, maximum of 868.64 million customers were found active in May and as per the report 102 percent of Idea’s subscribers were found to be active during the month.

The mobile subscriber base grew to 975.78 million in May from 973.35 million in April.

The growth in the mobile segment was led by Idea Cellular, which added over 1.25 million new customers taking its customer base to over 160 million. Bharti Airtel added over 1.19 million customers in May. New player Telewings, which operates under the Uninor brand, added 928,870 subscribers.

However, Reliance Communications, BSNL, Sistema Shyam and Tata Tele Services together lost over two million connections during the month.

Land line connections too continued to decline. The number of landline connections fell by 0.36 percent to 26.27 million in May over April.

"GADGET'S USING GRAPHENE FILM"

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology – Sweden, have developed a method for efficiently cooling electronics using graphene-based film. Almost half of the total energy used in running a computer goes in cooling it down. That is going to change now.

Getting rid of excess heat in efficient ways is imperative to prolonging electronic lifespan, and would also lead to a considerable reduction in energy usage, experts said. The film will be attached to the electronic components which is made up of Silicon and has thermal conductivity capacity which is four times than the copper.

Professor Johan Liu from Chalmers University had shown that the graphene have a cooling effect on Silicon-based electronics, but the challenge was to stick a thick layer of graphene to silicon chips.

According to the Prof Johan Liu, the problem can be solved by creating strong covalent bonds between the graphene film and the surface, which is an electronic component made of silicon. The functionalisation using this kind of bonding doubles the thermal conductivity of the graphene.

The Prof Liu states that “ Increased thermal capacity could lead to several new applications for graphene. One example is the integration of graphene-based film into microelectronic devices and systems, such as highly efficient Light Emitting Diode, lasers and radio frequency components for cooling purposes. He also said that Graphene-based film could also pave the way for faster, smaller, more energy efficient, sustainable high power electronics.

"HOW FINANCIAL MARKET VOLATILITY LEADS TO SHARP COMMODITY SLUMPS?"

A number of commodities have seen sharp corrections lower in recent weeks just as financial market volatility has been on the rise.

A new report by Deutsche Bank says that the recent sharp slump in commodities are more financially driven than a reflection of worsening physical demand for commodities.

A number of commodities have seen sharp declines since the end of June including iron ore (-25%), Brent crude oil (-9%), copper (-5%), thermal coal (-4%) in tandem with a selloff in Chinese equities and as the final days of reckoning in the Greek debt crisis approach.

One possible causal link could be the various restrictions against selling Chinese equities which, in DB’s view, mean that commodities can serve as a proxy hedge. Additionally, liquidation of commodity holdings could fund margin calls on the Chinese equity market exposure.

“Financial market volatility will not, at this stage, materially alter our fundamental market balance assumptions, and in this sense commodity markets have suffered an exogenous shock over the past week.”

A more serious concern is whether these events will unfold in such a manner as to deflect economic growth expectations to the downside in the weeks and months ahead.

DB’s China economists believe that the Chinese equity decline, particularly in H-share Hong Kong market, is not supported by fundamentals.

“Although retail investors represent the majority of share turnover, we expect little spillover to the real economy as equity exposure represents a small share of household assets compared to real estate.”

“However, we would view bulk commodities and specifically iron ore and thermal coal, as markets which are structurally weak where any price recoveries are likely to be unsustainable,” DB said.

“Moreover we do not see the decline in oil as changing the fundamentally negative outlook, so any price rebound on a normalization of the financial environment will be limited, in our view. We continue to watch fundamentals of energy names in the US High Yield sector given the broader contagion risks a default cycle in this sector might pose.”