FACIAL recognition software that’s as good as people at spotting family resemblances could help to reunite lost family members – or help the likes of Facebook work out which of your friends are blood relatives.

We intuitively recognise family resemblance through features like shared eye colour or chin contours, but computers have a hard time making such links between photos of different people.

of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, trained a piece of software to determine whether or not a pair of photos shows a parent and child. To do this, the team used a database of public figures and their parents or children – such as French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his son Jean – and fed the program 320 pairs each of parent-child matches and mismatches. The program analyses pictures one pixel at a time and looks for trends in the surrounding pixels.

The software then compared the difference between a test pair of photos with pairs of photos in its database. If the differences between the photos were similar to those between parent-child pairs, the images were declared a kinship match. In tests using 160 pairs – 80 parent-child matches and 80 mismatches – the system had a success rate of 68 per cent. The work was presented last week at the in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Unlike some previous kinship-recognition programs, Lu’s system can deal with variations in pose, expression and illumination. But because it simply compares groups of pixels, it doesn’t reveal anything about which facial characteristics might be the best indicators of family ties.

To address this, at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues considered 22 facial characteristics which, based on literature in genetic and cognitive science, seemed likely to be hereditary. They then used software to analyse these features and assessed the predictive ability of each by comparing them between 150 celebrity parent-child pairs and another 150 mismatched pairs. “We found the optimal combination of six features that can give the highest accuracy,” says Fang. The most predictive features were the darkness and colour of the eyes, the darkness and colour of the skin, and the distances between the nose and mouth and the eyes and nose.

The team tested the abilities of human volunteers to spot family ties, and found that humans correctly identified parent-child matches and mismatches 67 per cent of the time, than their algorithm’s 71 per cent. This work was shown at last year’s IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in Hong Kong. Fang hopes to boost matching performance by comparing pictures of several family members to a single unidentified photo.

Lu reckons that improved algorithms could be used to help determine kinship when DNA testing isn’t an option. “It can also help refugees find dispersed family members,” he suggests.

THE universal demand for energy means the oil and gas industry is a truly global one. But that also means events all over the world can affect it – from the economic, such as increasing demand from China; to the political, such as the pinch in supply due to the Arab Spring; to the uncontrollable, such as when hurricane Katrina temporarily cut off oil production in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005.

Even slight fluctuations in supply and demand can change prices drastically, something energy companies have to juggle with environmental pressures, diminishing resources and stringent government regulations. Because of this, “the oil and gas business is one that looks to the long term”, with people working on projects that can span 25 to 40 years, says Simon Drysdale, head of BP’s human resources in oil and gas.

Oil has long been the world’s favoured fuel, but as the need to lower carbon emissions has risen up the international agenda over the last decade, natural gas has become an attractive alternative as it produces 28 per cent less carbon dioxide than oil when burned. Whilst a legally binding carbon reduction treaty has yet to be finalised, there is no doubt that governments and people across the world have become more environmentally conscientious, which has played a part in some companies’ decisions to diversify into renewable energy. “We have to be part of the general move to other energy sources both because of climate change and before oil and gas resources really do start to run out,” says Robert Wine, BP’s spokesperson.

BP is focusing on wind, solar, biofuel and carbon capture and storage technologies, and has committed to spend $8 billion on these between 2006 and 2015. “None of these projects are going to earn much money for a while,” says Wine, but subsidised wind developments are “earning their keep”.

Other oil companies are also getting in on the act. Chevron, for example, is focusing on biofuels, solar and geothermal power. But the returns are still too small for some, such as Shell, which scrapped its renewables programme in 2009.

That leaves companies having to up their game in the extraction stakes. People perceive rising fuel prices as evidence of scarcer energy resources but “the reality is that it is the ‘easy oil’ that has already been produced,” says Wine. “New resources are still abundant but they are more expensive to access.”

“The days of ‘easy oil’ are over. New resources are still abundant but they are more expensive to access”

With the easy oil out of the way, companies are coming up with new approaches to access what’s left. One option is to devise ways to step up the amount of oil or gas that can be recovered from existing wells. Another is to go after reserves that can only be extracted through unconventional means.

Last month, oil and gas exploration company , based in Lichfield, Staffordshire, announced that it had found over 5600 trillion litres of natural gas under Lancashire. But there’s a problem: it is held in layers of shale rather than porous sandstone, which prevents the gas from flowing freely to the well. This means the layers must be cracked using a controversial process known as fracking. The rock is blasted with water and chemicals to create fissures, along with sand to hold the cracks open. Gas can then flow through the cracks into the well.

Cuadrilla has permission to explore the field but in order to produce gas, the company will need to get its plan approved by the government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change as well as planning permission from Lancashire county council. Chief executive Mark Miller is hopeful that the project will get the green light, and Cuadrilla is recruiting five technicians to help drill the test wells.

Another option companies have to secure future resources is to exploit regions with conditions that were once deemed too difficult to work in. The inhospitable seas of the Arctic are among the few places left which are under-explored for oil and gas, says Andy Brogan, Ernst & Young’s global oil and gas transactions leader, and offshore drilling there is becoming more common. “Those are new provinces – deep water but also polar,” he says. “You are at the very edge of the envelope in terms of operations.” Oil giant is already active in the Barents Sea, north of Norway, and , a smaller company based in Edinburgh, is probing waters up to 1500 metres deep off the coast of Greenland.

Beating the big freeze

Since many of the untapped reserves are found in environmentally fragile locations, such as the Arctic Circle, regulations imposed on companies are understandably tight. “From the very beginning, we put in place a robust programme that meets the stringent regulations from the Greenland government,” says David Nisbet, Cairn’s spokesperson. For example, Greenland requires Cairn to deploy two drilling vessels so that if one well develops a problem, the other vessel can immediately start drilling a relief well. The country also stipulates that drilling operations be completed months before the sea ice returns, allowing time to drill a relief well before ice cover sets in, if necessary.

To attain drilling rights, Cairn employed an asset manager to negotiate with the country’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum. As with many of the top jobs in oil and gas, asset managers can come from a variety of backgrounds, but they must have a solid knowledge of the industry and project management skills (see “Wanted: old hands”).

At present, the project is exploratory. Between 500 and 600 people work on the rigs and 14 support vessels, says Nisbet. However, if the wells turn up a reserve of 250 million barrels of oil or more, Cairn will move into the production phase. On a previous project, in Rajasthan, India, that meant 16,000 workers constructing the platforms and pipeline, and running the wells. If a Greenland reserve pans out, Cairn will hire additional employees from the UK. It will also hire contractors, giving Greenlandic businesses priority as per their drilling agreement with the country.

Whether it be political change or the demise of easy oil, the industry’s intrinsic connectedness to the rest of the world makes it an exciting place to work. Energy underpins all other businesses, says Hannah Howard, a young engineer at ExxonMobil. “It was this realisation that made me want to work in oil and gas.” Wine echoes this: “People at BP feel they’re doing something useful, contributing not just to the company but to society.”

Hannah Howard has a master’s in chemical engineering from the University of Birmingham.

Unlike many graduates, Hannah Howard was in the lucky position of already knowing where she would work by the time she embarked on her final year of university. The summer before, she had spent eight weeks on a placement at �����DzԲѴDz�����’s . She made a good enough impression that the company told her they would have a job for her when she graduated.

As part of three year graduate training programme, Howard has been on both internal and external courses, some run by the London Business School. She says the wide variety of courses available has given her an insight into the different technical fields within the refinery plant, and into the management and financial side of the oil and gas industry.

Howard spent her first two years with the plant’s design team, developing projects to improve the performance of the refinery. During the past year, she has been the hydrofining development engineer within the Catalytic Cracking team.

Hydrofining refers to a method of purifying crude oil using hydrogen and a catalyst. After boiling separates out the lighter hydrocarbons in the crude oil, heavy residues made up of long-hydrocarbon chains are left behind. The Catalytic Cracking team oversees the removal of contaminants such as sulphur from these chains and “cracks” them into shorter, useful molecules such as petrol and diesel.

“I really enjoy working in the team,” says Howard. While she doesn’t have any immediate plans to change positions, she says that she’d like to take on a supervisory role sometime in the future. The company provides plenty of career inspiration, she says, putting on talks about opportunities and career paths taken by others – both geographically and through the company’s departments. “I’d like to move around – see a bit more of what the company has to offer,” she says.

As well as her engineering work, Howard is kept busy studying for further technical qualifications – she hopes to attain chartered status with the in a year’s time, through �����DzԲѴDz�����’s training programme.

Since the early 1950s, water flooding – or pumping water down “injection” wells into the reservoir – has been a common approach for pushing more oil to the surface. Yet even with this tactic, on average, drilling only taps around a third of the store of hydrocarbons – the long-chain molecules that make up crude oil – held in a reservoir.

As technology innovation leader in BP’s aptly titled Pushing Reservoir Limits (PRL) group, it is Andrew Cockin and his colleagues’ job to find inventive solutions that increase the amount of oil delivered to the production wells.

In order to develop these next generation technologies, Cockin spends his days reviewing the details of the oil wells in the many places BP operates and keeping up to date with the latest research.

“I try to link solutions to problems,” he says. This often involves meeting the reservoir engineers, who know the details of their oil fields intricately, and organising workshops with researchers from academia and BP’s own R&D team. He describes this as “facilitating imaginations running wild”.

A technology known as is one of the innovations Cockin implemented. Simply flooding an oil reservoir with water misses a lot of the oil because the water will always take the path of least resistance. To make it more efficient, the PRL team realised they needed to close off the easy paths so that the water is forced to push out more of the oil. But how could this be done? The solution came in the form of “a long-chain molecule, wrapped up like a tiny ball of wool and added to the water”, describes Cockin. It starts out small enough to get through the pores in the sandstone but expands by a factor of 10 when heated. Since the sandstone layers are bordered above and below by hot, oil-bearing rock, this heat is enough to block the sandstone pores and hinder the subsequent flow of water through the channel.

Bright Water was first developed in 1997 but the technology wasn’t ready for deployment in BP’s wells until 2005. “It takes a lot of endurance and tenacity to keep going” on these long-term projects, says Cockin. Since then, he estimates that the technique has increased the oil production rate of a well by up to 50 per cent.

Anton Ziolkowski is a professor of petroleum geoscience at the University of Edinburgh. He has a BA in engineering and physics and a PhD in geophysics from the University of Cambridge. As well as academic research, Ziolkowski worked as a geophysicist at the UK National Coal Board and the British National Oil Corporation.

A common dilemma in oil and gas exploration is whether or not to spend money digging exploratory wells. Seismic techniques are good for finding porous rock but this is no guarantee that the rock contains oil or gas deposits. To avoid drilling before knowing for sure that there are hydrocarbons – the chain-like chemical compounds that make up oil and gas – down there rather than just salty water, Anton Ziolkowski, along with two colleagues from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, developed a method to measure the ground’s hydrocarbon content using electricity. They commercialised the technology and later set up a spin-off company called MTEM (which stands for “multi-transient electromagnetics”) to market their technique.

Their idea was to apply an electric current to the Earth’s surface, sending electromagnetic waves into the ground. Receiver electrodes then pick up the reflections that have bounced off the different layers, giving information about the electrical properties of the rocks beneath. Areas of high electrical resistance in porous rock indicate oil or gas, says Ziolkowski.

To commercialise the new method, the team received £200,000 from the innovation support body for patents and prototype equipment. They then assessed their start-up costs for equipment, location and staff. The sum was so large that the researchers needed a CEO to bring investors on board.

In 2004, three years after proof of principle trials, the team launched MTEM with a budget of £7.4 million. This meant that rather than waiting for months or years to buy resources to test their ideas through the university, Ziolkowski and his collaborators could buy equipment or hire staff as soon as they took the decision. “If you know what you want to do, you can get a lot done fast,” says Ziolkowski.

Even so, the oversight from their investors was more exhaustive than the academics were used to, with milestones to reach, monthly board meetings and weekly progress reports. While Ziolkowski found the fast-paced environment exciting, he recalls “we were on a treadmill from day one.”

MTEM ran independently for three years between 2004 and 2007, at which point the Norwegian company (PGS) bought the start-up for £137 million. Ziolkowski and the other co-founders continued to work at the company for two and half years as part of the acquisition deal.

Today Ziolkowski is back at the University of Edinburgh, although he continues his relationship with PGS in the form of a research alliance. The company pays a portion of his salary while his research group spends part of its time developing methods that may help the company.

Like other markets, oil and gas was hit by the recession but it has already bounced back. The job market in Aberdeen, the hub of the industry in the UK, is particularly buoyant. “In the rest of the UK, there are more people than jobs, but in Aberdeen, there are more jobs than people,” says Graeme Fyfe of recruitment consultancy .

If you have a background in the physical sciences or engineering and you want to put your science skills into practise in the real world, then working in the oil and gas industry could be the perfect career. Brogan describes it as “a fantastic industry” for science and engineering graduates; only the pharmaceutical sector is comparable in size, funding and scope for career development in the UK. Plus the pay packets aren’t to be sniffed at (see our interactive graphic Who’s who in oil and gas).

Oil and gas professionals work in a variety of roles, from overseeing the entire process from well to petrol pump at a multinational energy company, to playing an advisory role in a small consultancy or actually carrying out technical work on a rig or at a refinery as a contractor, (see our interactive graphic How much could you earn?).

To help get you started, 91av has pulled together all you need to know about the industry, from what to do to get your foot in the door to how companies are squeezing as much as they can from oil reserves.

Not surprisingly the price of oil is a major driver of growth in the energy industry. Like all other markets, it is set by supply and demand. The demand side of the equation is driven by areas of growth in the global economy – namely the energy-intensive development of the Asian economies over the last five years, says Andy Brogan, ‘s Global Oil & Gas Transactions leader.

On the supply side, world events such as the Arab Spring uprisings can reduce the amount of oil available, driving prices up. However, because the rate at which oil is produced doesn’t change that quickly, relatively small drops in demand can lead to large surpluses that cause oil prices to take a major fall, says Brogan.

Ian Newth, director of consultancy and a 35-year veteran in the field, recalls two major crises in the industry in 1986 and between 1998 and 1999, when the oil price crashed to below $10 a barrel. “Both of these had the effect of stripping out large numbers of people working in the industry,” he says. Many didn’t come back when the oil price recovered, creating a shortage of workers with 10 to 20 years of experience which, he says, is still felt across the industry.

As a result, skilled workers are in high demand. Brogan says the industry is growing at present – both in large-scale offshore projects, such as deep-sea drilling, and more unconventional onshore sources, such as oil shale, a sedimentary rock containing kerogen, a precursor to petroleum, and tar sands, a mixture of sand or clay and a viscous, black petroleum deposit called bitumen.

Dwindling resources

Tar sands and oil shale are expensive to extract – in terms of both money and energy. However since conventional resources are running out (experts estimate that if we haven’t already reached “peak oil”– the moment that the rate of global oil production peaks and then heads into terminal decline – it is imminent), companies are increasingly going after the reserves once deemed too difficult difficult for extraction to be worthwhile. This means they need innovative people to devise strategies to maximise production and reduce the environmental cost (see The man from the multinational).

Graeme Fyfe of says that oil companies are still hunting for new fields to ensure a steady supply of oil, even in the thoroughly-explored North Sea. Often any new sources they find there can be reached from existing offshore platforms. “The need for a new rig for every single new discovery that happens isn’t the case anymore,” he says.

In addition to the demand for geoscientists to find new reserves, BP spokesperson Robert Wine emphasises the need for chemical engineers. Chemical engineers are already involved in processing but Wine expects their importance to grow even further “because so much future energy demand will require reshaping molecules in one way or another, whether it is energy from plants for biofuel or fossil fuels,” he says.

See our interactive graphic: “How much could you earn?“

Locating oil starts with geologists and geophysicists who send sound waves into the Earth and measure the echoes that bounce back. From this, they can work out the depths and densities of different layers of rock. The first sign of oil or gas, or both, is the presence of porous rocks, such as sandstone, as the oil and gas can be held in the spaces between the grains of sand.

Although the high-precision seismic, gravitational, magnetic and electromagnetic methods that geophysicists use can give some hints, it is usually impossible to be certain whether a candidate location contains oil until the drilling engineers have made their first test well. This is a well tapping directly into the potential reservoir to see if there is anything there (see Case study: the entrepreneur).

If the reserve is offshore, platform engineers create the rig structure from which the drilling and operations teams will work. Drilling engineers then have to find the best way down through layers of rock and the ideal angle at which to tap the reservoir, working closely with geoscientists. Once the oil well is drilled, engineers need to add piping around it to ensure oil does not escape. When the drill breaks into the reservoir, the higher pressure in the reservoir drives the crude oil, water and gas up the shaft of the well.

Operations

At this point the operations team takes over. Chemical and mechanical engineers, known as process engineers, set up on-site processing facilities to separate the oil and gas from the water and mud also coming out of the well. The water that comes up with the oil typically gets pumped back into the reservoir to keep the pressure high and force more oil up the well, while the gas may be harvested or go back down with the water.

Depending on the composition of the mixture that spurts out, chemical engineers tailor a cocktail of chemicals to flush down the well. This fluid usually contains anti-corrosives to protect the walls of the well from the harsh crude oil, detergents for removing residues from the pipes and equipment, and more advanced compounds which stimulate the flow of oil.

Once the oil is out and separated from the slurry, it heads for a refinery where more process engineers distil and separate it into its constituents, which can then be used for car fuel, jet fuel, lubricants and hydrocarbons used in the manufacture of plastics. Because crude oil and its products can be explosive, process safety engineers ensure that these materials are handled safely and securely.

The vast majority of technical positions in the oil and gas industry fall into one of three disciplines – geosciences, mechanical engineering and chemical engineering. The good news is that companies are actually competing for the best people with these backgrounds, now that the industry has shaken off the effects of the recession.

If you are lucky, a BSc should be enough to get you on the first rung of the ladder at one of the big companies, especially if you have done some kind of industrial experience as part of your degree. However, with the general surplus of graduates looking for a job right now, you may find you need a relevant master’s degree to help you stand out from the crowd.

If you have just graduated or expect to soon now is the time to start applying to major companies such as and as their graduate recruitment schemes open for applications in September (the other big one, , tends to be more flexible about when it recruits). BP is expecting to hire over 150 graduates in the UK this year says Simon Drysdale, head of Upstream Human Resources (the “upstream” refers to exploration and production as opposed to separation and distribution). The graduates recruited can expect to be paid between £34,000 and £36,000 depending on their specialism and location – not bad for a graduate salary (and more than the global average base rate for the industry, see our interactive graphic How much could you earn?).

Many big corporations also recruit interns in the autumn, to work for a whole year or for the following summer. A carried out by market research company High Flyers into the hiring trends of employers included in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers 2010 found that 39 per cent of the vacancies in oil and other energy companies were filled by graduates who had already worked at the company (a proportion second only to investment banking and law). So if you are in the last couple of years of your undergraduate degree, a successful summer internship could be a convenient route into a full-time job after graduation.

Recent graduates can benefit from networking at industry events, says Ed Alnutt of recruitment consultancy . A good way in is to attend events such as those organised by the where you can get a feel for the market, meet employers and find out the types of people they are looking for. Go to these events prepared with CVs and a portfolio of any previous work you have undertaken, as you never know when the opportunity may arise to impress an employer, says Alnutt.

While most graduates will plump for a training scheme at one of the big companies, Ian Newth, director of , an independent consultancy based in London, recommends that graduates get your feet under the table in whatever job you can and then see what else is out there. Once you are on the inside, he says, it is much easier to decide which roles you find the most interesting and work out how to work towards them.

Rising to the top

Once you are in the door, most of the major companies will encourage you to study for further qualifications, often providing financial support. There is a certain expectation that employees should achieve chartered status with an engineering society such as the , or get a fellowship with a group such as the says BP spokesperson Robert Wine, based in the company’s London offices.

Andrew Cockin, an R&D manager for BP says his company makes it a priority to keep employees up to date with the latest research and technology by sending them on training courses and to scientific meetings. Newth remembers the training as “absolutely phenomenal” from his time at BP in the 1980s. With two to three training courses a year, in technical skills or management, as well as exposure to a range of operating environments, Newth says that employees could gain high-level technical expertise as well as a broad view of the hydrocarbon industry in four or five years.

One way to climb the ladder is through sharply honed technical expertise says Graeme Fyfe of Hays Oil and Gas. The other is through the management and business side of things. Newth sounds a word of caution, though, if you fancy the more technical route: the rapidly changing nature of the industry can mean that someone with too narrow a focus runs the risk of becoming obsolete – so specialise, but just don’t forget to keep an eye on the bigger picture.

Smaller companies, such as independent consultancies, tend to employ professionals rather than train people from scratch. A common route through the industry is to begin at one of the big companies and then join a smaller organisation that specialises in the area you are interested in. However, if you want to get involved with energy policy, it might be wise to stick with a larger company as you may get to sit on committees and industry bodies, working with government regulators to help shape the future of the industry. “We are very active in making sure the industry has a voice in the decisions that affect us,” says Wine of BP.

Between 1.5 and 4 million Americans are waiting for surgery to fix a herniated spinal disc, but the relief provided from a synthetic implant is the best it’s ever going to be “the minute you put it into the patient”, says of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Living tissue can grow and adapt, so may provide a better long-term solution, he says.

Bonassar’s team used cells taken from sheep spines to build replicas of rat discs, and implanted them into the spines of rats.

The implanted discs stood up to pulling and compression like the original discs. Crucially, they also improved with age, growing new cells and binding to nearby vertebrae in the six months after surgery.

Although the study was in rats, “it shows us what is possible”, says at the National University of Ireland in Galway. He adds that future studies will need to address the load borne by upright human spines.

Journal reference: , DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1107094108