GE Reports | Your source for what's happening at GE.

The biggest players in the oil and gas industries are assembling in Oran, Algeria today for the 3-day LNG 16 conference, which brings together more than 2,500 attendees for the largest event in the world dedicated to the liquefied natural gas industry. As a global leader in LNG technology, GE Oil & Gas — which has been operating in Algeria for over 45 years — not only has a big presence at the summit, but it has just announced new deals in the country. In a $100 million contract with Petrofac, which provides services to many of the world’s largest oil & gas companies, GE is providing turbo compression equipment for the use in the El Merk Project, which is located in a harsh, remote section of the Sahara. It comes as GE’s new $36M investment in Algeria to expand the ALGESCO Service Center — which will be the largest GE Oil & Gas Service Center in the world — is nearing completion and will be formally inaugurated later this year.

Thinking big: GE Oil & Gas, with $7.7 billion in revenue in 2009, has more than 12,000 employees in 100 countries. Algeria, which is the third largest supplier of gas to Europe, has one of GE’s largest installed equipment bases including more than 400 gas turbines, more than 340 compressors and 35,000 km of inspected pipelines.

In Greek mythology, “gorgons” such as Medusa were terrifying creatures who could turn you to stone with just a look. Sitting off the north coast of Western Australia, the Greater Gorgon gas fields certainly have the ability to leave energy experts frozen in their tracks, as the area is estimated to contain about 40 trillion cubic feet of gas – making it Australia’s largest-known gas resource. Back in October, we reported that Chevron awarded GE Oil & Gas a contract worth over $400 million to supply advanced liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology for the drilling project. Today, that deal has now grown to include even more equipment — including orders of new natural gas turbines — bringing the total of Chevron’s deal with GE to over $1.1 billion.

For 900 business leaders gathered in Florence, Italy this week, having a “power lunch” is something taken quite literally. Representatives from many of the world’s largest oil and gas producers have assembled for today’s kick-off of the 11^th GE Oil & Gas Annual Meeting — which is an interactive set of working sessions and talks in which GE and global customers such as Chevron, Shell, Petrobras and ExxonMobil share best practices and tackle technology challenges. The Oil & Gas team is also making a number of announcements this week at the summit, including a new contract in Abu Dhabi valued at over $200 million; one in Slovakia for $102 million; and the first order of GE’s latest subsea equipment by Shell U.K. for North Sea fields.

GE, Europe’s major utility RWE, the German National Aerospace Institute, and other partners today announced the start of a development program called “ADELE,” which has the potential to revolutionize the way energy can be efficiently stored on a large scale. In the simplest of terms, the idea is to store inexpensive power generated during off-peak periods in the form of compressed air — as if in a giant battery — and then deliver this power at a later time during peak demand. “It’s very exciting news,” says Matthias Finkenrath, a research engineer working on the project with GE Global Research in Germany. “GE today took an important step in bringing the future of large scale energy storage closer.” The animation below explains how the complex system would work, which involves compressing air into underground caverns — likely in regions with geological salt structures, such as those currently used for natural gas storage — and then extracting it later to drive turbines to generate electricity.

Chevron has awarded GE Oil & Gas a contract worth over $400 million to supply advanced liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology for one of the world’s largest untapped natural gas fields. The Gorgon project will supply cleaner burning natural gas for the growing Asia-Pacific and Australian markets and features the world’s largest project to capture and store carbon dioxide.