Palash Basak's Blog

Night Lights of Bibiyana Gas Field Bibiyana Gas Plant, which is producing more than 30% gas of Bangladesh at present, is one of the remarkable features in the night lights of North-Eastern Bangladesh. It appears that the Bibiyana Gas Plant's light is brighter than that of Sunamganj, one of the districts under Sylhet Division. It is also visible in the night light map of Bangladesh as well. Bibiyana is expected to be larger than the initial estimates . Chevron, the operator of the gas plant, is going to invest additional 500 million dollars which is said to the single largest foreign investment in Bangladesh . The original image was taken by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite in any day between April 2012 and October 2012, and has been copied from NASA's Earth Observatory website ( Night Lights 2012 - Flat map ). This map has been created by annotating the original image in Google Earth (with international boarders) an...

Background Someday in early 2008, I was traveling in an SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle) from Dhaka to Moulavi Bazar (in Bangladesh) for a field visit. One of my colleagues, who was a Geophysicist, was also accompanying me in the trip. It was about 7-8 hours journey and we were talking most of the times. Discussion topics were diverse and one of the topics was alternative energy. At that point of time oil price was in its pick, probably about 150 US$ per barrel. All of the windows of the car were closed as because the AC was on. However, for some reason, the driver opened an window while the car was moving at about 80 km per hour. So, a huge blow of fresh air entered in to the car and splashed in to my face. Suddenly I realized that our car is generating huge amount of friction with the air! In other words, if I was out of the car and sitting or standing somewhere in the same spot of the road, I might not feel that much of air speed. But while the car was moving at a certain speed it wa...

I was amazed to read an article in Jugantor on 2nd February 2009. According to the article, electricity could be generated from Pathar-Kuchi, an indigenous plant of Bangladesh. I don't know the scientific name of the plant. It was claimed that substantial amount of electricity could be generated with the technology proposed by Dr. Kamrul Amal Khan, Chairman of the Department of Physics of Jagannath University and three of his associates. They explained in a seminar in Dhaka that 60-100 megawatt electricity could be generated from Pathar-Kuchi produced only from one acre of land. Click here to view the full article.