Last fall, GE Energy teamed up with NRGreen Power, an innovative Canadian power company, and brought to Alberta a new technology called ORegen. ORegen, which is ecomagination-certified, traps waste heat generated by big industrial machines and turns it into electricity. The system does not require fuel or water, and spews no emissions. The net gain is 14 megawatts of electricity out of hot air. That’s enough to power 14,000 Canadian homes.

If you pair ORegen with a conventional power station, it will boost the plant’s efficiency by 20 to 35 percent and deliver 40 percent more electricity with no additional fuel consumption. GE Energy built a website that shows how the system works. Take a look.

Florence also plays an annual host to the GE Oil & Gas summit, which kicked off this morning. The meeting gives hundreds of global industry leaders and technology experts a place to share and debate ideas such as deep water exploration, new oil recovery methods, and other complex challenges facing the industry.

GE used the first day of the meeting to announce a series of deals, including a $1 billion contract to supply subsea equipment and services to Ichtys, a massive liquefied natural gas facility (LNG) run by INPEX Corporation and Total in Western Australia. GE also said that it developed a MicroLNG plant, which can produce liquefied natural gas in small batches of just 150,000 gallons per day. Unlike Ichtys or other large export-oriented LNG plants, this ecomagination-qualified technology can produce LNG locally as an alternative fuel source for heavy duty trucks and off-road vehicles. GE estimates that switching from diesel to LNG could save a truck fleet operator $1,900 per vehicle in annual fuel costs, and a total of 80,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year. The company also announced new projects in the North Sea in the UK (subsea equipment), in Eastern Siberia (gas reinjection), Brazil (floating oil platform equipment), and elsewhere.

Perfection is no trifle at GE’s testing facility in Massa: Workers walk past a segment of a hydrocracking reactor.

The Oil & Gas division, which is now part GE Energy, ended last year strong. The unit reported an $11.8 billion backlog in equipment and services at the end 2011.

Supersize me: An employee inspects a segment of a centrifugal compressor.

What are some of the products in high demand? Start with GE Aviation. The world’s largest and most powerful commercial jet engine, GE90, has had its most successful year in 2011. Airlines and freighter operators ordered 400 of the engines valued at $11 billion (list price).

The engine’s French-American cousins, the CFM56 and LEAP engines, also had a record year. CFM International, a joint company between GE Aviation and France’s Snecma, received orders and commitments for more than 2,900 CFM56 and LEAP engines valued at $30 billion. There is a good reason for the ecomagination-qualified LEAP to be popular. The engine can achieve double-digit improvements in fuel burn and emissions, and lower maintenance costs. The total GE Aviation backlog stood at $99 billion in equipment and services at the end of 2011.

GE Energy’s total backlog surpassed $72.7 billion at the end of last year. The unit received orders and commitments that included the new ecomagination-qualified FlexEfficiency 50 Combined Cycle Power Plant. GE invested $500 million to develop the technology. The system helps utilities efficiently incorporate power generated by renewable sources such as wind and solar farms. It can ramp up power production on a cloudy day in minutes, twice the rate of today’s energy benchmarks.

Other GE divisions that reported multi-billion backlogs include GE Healthcare ($3.9 billion in equipment), and GE Transportation ($3.3 billion in equipment).

“We feel good about where we are,” Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and chief executive, said on a call with analysts. “Organic growth looks solid with a $200 billion backlog.”

A typical gas turbine wastes as much as two-thirds of the heat it generates by burning natural gas. Billions of dollars are lost as wasted heat in the U.S. every year. GE’s new technology, called ORegen, short for Organic Regenerator, uses an innovative way to trap heat and convert into megawatts of clean power. The technology does not need any additional source of energy to operate and generates zero greenhouse emissions.

ORegen has been approved by GE’s Ecomagination initiative focused on promoting clean technology. The new system can boost power plant efficiency by as much as 25%, when connected to GE’s PGT25+ gas turbines, and eliminate more than 38,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. That amounts to taking 14,000 cars off U.S. roads.

GE just announced that the first ORegen system will be based in Whitecourt in Alberta, Canada. The project will generate 14 megawatts of clean electricity. That’s enough electricity to power 14,000 Canadian homes for one year. It is slated to come on-line by 2013.

Other power generators, like combined gas and steam cycle power plants, trap waste heat to produce extra electricity. But ORegen is unique because it does not need any water to operate and works in freezing weather.

GE engineers found a way to scale up the Organic Rankine Cycle, a heat exchange mechanism. They transfer waste heat as hot as 900° Fahrenheit into oil and then to a special fluid, whose boiling point is just 127° Fahrenheit. The vaporized fluid then turns the power-generating turbine.

Engineers have calculated that the ORegen system operating for more than 8,500 hours a year will generate the same amount of power as a similar combined-cycle system, but save four Olympic-sized swimming pools of water annually.

ORegen can be attached to any regular gas turbine.

Here are some highlights from today’s announcement:

1. Cool Technology Combinations – One advantage GE enjoys is the breadth of its advanced tech offerings, which enables creative solutions using different products in tandem. For example, GE announced today it will support the Queensland Gas Company’s major Australian coal seam gas-to-LNG project with a mashup of Waukesha engine tech and Jenbacher Gas Engines that will together provide on-site power for another of GE’s offerings: advanced membrane and thermal water treatment tech (used to desalinate water produced during the extraction process). Similarly, in Italy, GE will combine Clean Cycle™ waste heat recovery tech and Jenbacher gas engines to help European power customers maximize output and minimize consumption of fuel, part of which is biogas from pig and cow manure, corn and other crops.

2. Brazil is Hot – More than a third of today’s announced total dollar amount comes from projects in emerging powerhouse Brazil. GE won 40 percent of the total amount of energy auctioned by the country’s National Electric Power Agency: 378 megawatts (MW) of wind power to be generated by GE’s 1.6 wind turbine tech and one whole gigawatt of natural gas power generation using its 7FA gas turbine combined-cycle tech. GE was also awarded a major subsea and surface contract for drilling and production equipment by OGX.

3. Making a Move in LNG – GE will supply steam turbines and compressors for the world’s largest Floating Liquefied Natural Gas platform, the Shell Prelude project, which is located 200 km off Western Australia’s Kimberly Coast. Including this new project, GE has won a total of $1 billion in global LNG contracts.

4. Wind at its Back – GE’s 1.6-100 wind turbine will be flying off the shelves. Today the company announced it has earned more than $1.5 billion in new commitments for 750 turbines for wind farms in North and South America over the next two years, bringing total orders for the 1.6-100 to nearly 2 gigawatts and $2.7 billion.

5. Helping Power Egypt – GE will supply six advanced F-technology gas turbines and related services for two new combined-cycle power plants near Cairo that will add ten percent of capacity to Egypt’s power grid, helping support the country’s rapidly growing energy needs. At $300 million, it’s the largest power generation order ever between Egypt and GE.

Those five highlights are just some of the major customer agreements announced today, which also include: enhanced oil recovery operations and tech and service support to an independent power producer in Iraq; GE Energy’s first foray into providing manufacturing solutions to drive energy efficiency and water savings in the food and beverage sector, with Anheuser-Busch InBev facilities in China; the largest smart grid project in Latin America, with Electrica de Guayaquil in Ecuador; and water treatment and recycling using GE’s patented evaporative tech, with Grizzly Oil Sands ULC’s Algar Lake project in Canada.

One handsome machine: the FlexAero LM6000-PH.

The vast majority of electricity in the US is produced with thermally driven water-cooled energy conversion cycles, but the LM6000-PH does what it does without water. And with GE’s DLE2.0 technology, NOx and CO2 emissions are low enough not to need water for dilution, as is typically required for gas turbines. “Today, 30 percent of the world’s population is water constrained,” said Steve Bolze, President and CEO of GE Power & Water. “The FlexAero LM6000-PH is the only gas turbine of its kind that combines flexibility and efficiency at these levels with zero water requirements.”

The LM6000-PH is a product of GE’s aeroderivative business, which modifies jet engines to use natural gas and biofuels. Flexibility and efficiency are the key qualities here, where balancing the power grid cost-effectively and helping to deploy a mix of renewable power resources like wind and solar are crucial. The new turbine leads the market in flexibility and efficiency.

Demand is growing for gas turbines: GE also announced today that its aeroderivative and heavy duty gas turbines lines have pulled in more than $1 billion in orders and commitments for projects throughout North America since January this year. That popularity reflects a shift toward natural gas for energy generation. According to the Financial Times, Credit Suisse analysts project that a full 25% of power generation capacity additions in the next five years will be gas power plants, a figure which would boost orders for gas turbines by 50%.

* Trademark of the General Electric Company

GE is making a big commitment to doing just that in Saudi Arabia, where it celebrated the grand opening of the GE Energy Manufacturing Technology Center on Thursday.

The 32,000 square-foot center in Dammam, Saudi Arabia includes a manufacturing facility for high technology equipment for the power, water and oil and gas industries; a service and repair center for advanced turbine equipment; and a training center to empower Saudi college students. (More than 100 Saudi students have already participated in GE co-op programs with local universities.)

GE’s locations in Saudi Arabia

As part of the launch, GE announced an additional $150 million (SAR560 million) investment in the project, bringing the company’s total commitment to $250 million (SAR1 billion).

In 1970, a GE gas turbine met the power requirements of Riyadh.

The “end-to-end” goal of the center is key. GE can repair advanced technology gas turbine-related parts locally, for instance, rather than send them out of the country, to save time and cost.

The facility will create 2,000 new jobs, supporting goals outlined in Saudi Vision 2020, the Kingdom’s plan for economic development over the next decade.

“As Saudi Arabia forges ahead with its ambitious development plans,” GE vice chairman John Krenicki said at the opening, “the center underscores GE’s commitment to be closer to our customers who trust us to deliver the latest technologies and services across the energy landscape.”

GE has a long history in Saudi Arabia. It supplied the Kingdom with equipment for its first oil expedition in 1942, and has facilitated its growth with energy and communication equipment ever since. GE currently supports roughly half of the Kingdom’s electricity with more than 500 turbines installed throughout Saudi Arabia.

* To learn more about the center and GE’s energy projects in the Middle East, check out the GE Hewar blog

* Read more Txchnologist on natural gas, including an overview of some of the issues animating the coal to gas debate, the promise of methane hydrates, “the ice that burns,” as the next big energy resource and a deep dive into GE’s big gas tech breakthrough: the FlexEfficiency 50, a super-efficient and flexible natural gas power plant.

The way that natural gas turbines work to support renewable energy in a power grid is simple: when a period of intermittency begins, the gas turbine is capable of firing up quickly to continue supplying power to the system without interruption. In designing the FlexEfficiency 50, GE drew from its jet engine expertise to engineer a plant that can ramp up at twice the rate of today’s industry benchmarks – and just as quickly and efficiently, ramp down again when the renewable sources come back online. That ability to ramp down quickly is what makes the new technology flexible – and when combined with high efficiency, it results in big cost savings and emissions reductions.

Check out the infographic and schematic below to see how the FlexEfficiency 50 works:

With the new tech, a utility will save approximately $2.6 million per year under typical operating conditions, and each plant will cut annual CO2 emissions by more than 12,700 metric tons — equivalent to removing more than 6,000 cars from EU roads. They’ll have annual fuel savings of 6.4 million cubic meters of natural gas, which is equivalent to the annual natural gas consumption of more than 4,000 EU homes.

* Read today’s announcement.
* Watch a webcast from the Paris event at 8 a.m. ET
* Read about GE’s recent big investment in solar energy, the deployment of which will be aided by the new natural gas tech announced today.
* Read about GE’s new wind turbine, the most efficient ever.
* See why FlexEfficiency is part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio.

* Trademark of the General Electric Company

Here are three ways these recent acquisitions are fueling that growth:

- The GE Oil & Gas Display at this week’s Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Texas.

A crowd gathers around a model of Wellstream’s deepwater tech at GE Oil & Gas’s display.

1. Getting More Out of Existing Reservoirs: With its $2.8 billion acquisition of the John Wood Group’s well support division, GE Oil & Gas has added electric submersible pump technology, which helps customers recover previously inaccessible oil in previously-drilled, or “enhanced oil recovery.” On average, drillers can only access 1/3 of the oil in a given reservoir. As Santiago points out, “If we can help them improve their reserves by even just 3 percent, that would be like making available to them all the reserves currently in Iraq.” With maturing fields expected to account for over 70 percent of global oil production output by 2012, this technology is key for maximizing existing resources.
2. Going Deep: GE Oil & Gas’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Wellstream adds flexible riser and flowline technologies that improve the company’s position in the rapidly growing deepwater market. Just as importantly, it brings with it 850 highly qualified engineers and staff and two manufacturing facilities in the U.K. and Brazil.
3. Low Maintenance Drilling: With GE Energy’s proposed $3.2 billion acquisition of Converteam, GE adds fully electronic solutions for compression applications in the oil and gas industry, meaning lower emissions and less maintenance. Converteam brings power electronics, industrial automation and process controls technology that aligns GE with the recent electrification trend in pipelines and compressor apps – not to mention 5,300 new employees, including more than 1,600 engineers.

* Read about GE Oil & Gas’s acquisitions in more detail: John Wood Group, Converteam and Wellstream