Two sediment depth cores were collected from the floor of Loch Etive, near Oban, Scotland. Slicing was performed in an anaerobic bag. Samples were taken at 0.5 cm increment between 0 - 2 cm, 1 cm increments between 2 - 10 cm, and at either 2 or 5 cm increments thereafter. Samples were transferred to Newcastle University for DNA extraction. A total of 21 samples were extracted for core 1, and 23 samples extracted for core 2.

The data consists of an extended abstract submitted to 'The Fourth International Conference on Fault and Top Seals', Almeria, Spain, 20-24th September 2015. The abstract describes work carried-out on behalf of the 'Fault seal controls on CO2 storage capacity in aquifers' project funded by the UKCCS Research Centre, grant number UKCCSRC-C1-14. The CO2-rich St. Johns Dome reservoir in Arizona provides a useful analogue for leaking CO2 storage sites, and the abstract describes an analysis of the fault-seal behaviour at the site. http://earthdoc.eage.org/publication/publicationdetails/?publication=82673.

The world's population is predicted to grow from the current 7 billions to a plateau of approximately 9.2 billions to be reached within the next 60 years, representing roughly a 30 % increase in a not so distant future. The need for more energy efficient methods of producing synthetic fertilisers to meet the resulting increases in food demand and in crude (and bio) oils refining operations -on crudes of ever poorer quality- motivates the scientific community to reconsider the limitations of the mature technologies of synthetic fertilisers production and hydro-refining processes (HDS, HDN, HDM, HDO, hydrocracking) which both rely on the supply of hydrogen. Synthetic fertilisers necessitate hydrogen and nitrogen as feedstocks to make ammonia, which represents the building block for other fertilisers such as urea or ammonium nitrate. The current cheapest and most common means of producing hydrogen is natural gas steam reforming. With an abundance of natural gas reserves becoming exploitable worldwide in recent years via the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas, and given the ever more severe regulations on atmospheric pollution caused by flaring of associated gas from refineries and oil extraction operations, the production of hydrogen is very likely to remain dominated in the years to come by the process of steam reforming using natural gas as its feedstock (aka 'steam methane reforming' or 'SMR'). Conventional SMR technology usually features many unit operations (desulphurisation, pre-reforming, primary reforming, furnace, high and low temperature water gas shift (HT-WGS, LT-WGS), and final separation, with as many heat integration steps in between the units in order to reach an energy efficiency of roughly 80%. This efficiency is only attainable thanks to economies of scale, and SMR plants are consequently enormous. To avoid storage and transport costs of H2, the ammonia/ammonium nitrate/urea plants, or refinery operations are usually conducted near the site of SMR, therefore the production of the final products of fertilisers or clean fuels is very centralised, and thus vulnerable, as well as incurring large distribution costs. With sources of natural gas becoming more remote, widely distributed, shorter lived and quickly relocated, the process of converting natural gas to the final products fertiliser/clean fuel should become more mobile, down-scaleable, as fracking gas wells see their production decay with time and move to different sites. This proposal seeks to reduce significantly the energy and materials demand for the conversion of natural gas feedstocks into ready separated streams of the H2, N2 and CO2 products of steam reforming (the building blocks of urea production) by coupling the in-situ high temperature CO2 capture during the reforming reactions on a solid sorbent (a process called 'sorption enhancement') with the process of chemical looping steam reforming. A process is proposed with only two reactors, a reformer and a pressure/temperature swing separator, appropriate for the new, mobile, small scale industrial utilisation of natural gas, through realising the multiple synergies that are unique to the coupled process, and through the avoidance of expensive materials and awkward reformer geometries. Grant number: UKCCSRC-C2-181.

Detrital zircon age data, details of Expedition 362 samples . For more information see published report, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2017.07.019 IODP Sites U1480–U1481, located on the Indian oceanic plate, east of the NinetyEast Ridge and west of the north Sumatran subduction margin Site U1480 ~ 3°2.0447'N 91°36.3481'E 4147.5 Site U1481 ~ 2°45.261'N 91°45.5771'E

Dataset of material characterisation (X-ray diffraction) analyses to constrain the nature of materials produced during Fe(II)-silicate precipitation experiments from seawater in the presence of various metals.

Porewaters from IODP Expedition 366 were extracted from serpentinite mud volcano sediments onboard the RV JOIDES Resolution (see Fryer et al, 2017; 2018 for details). Selected samples were then analysed at the University of Southampton for 87Sr/86Sr and boron isotopes and SUERC for stable hydrogen and oxygen isotope data. The strontium isotope data has recently been accepted for publication (Albers et al., 2019 (In Press) Fluid–rock interactions in the shallow Mariana forearc: carbon cycling and redox conditions, Solid Earth special issue "Exploring new frontiers in fluids processes in subduction zones").

There were a number of aims of this project - to develop initial flowsheets and designs for CLC with oxygen uncoupling; to model and design reactors; and to produce and test a variety of novel materials for CLC with oxygen uncoupling. The project has succeeded in a number of aims; to develop and test materials (Cambridge), to conduct an initial test of CLC with oxygen uncoupling (the first at scale in the UK, conducted at Cranfield, and the major stated aim of the project - see Figure 2-13), and to model and develop a novel reactor for CLC with oxygen uncoupling (Imperial). Overall, these aspects exceeded the initial project brief. Initial time-dependent flowsheets were developed at Cambridge for CLC processes - unfortunately key staff loss led to a significant hiatus in the activity. Industrial reviewing was limited because of the challenges in developing the flowsheeting activity.

The datasets contain time-resolved synchrotron X-ray micro-tomographic images (grey-scale and segmented) of multiphase (brine-oil) fluid flow (during drainage and imbibition) in a carbonate rock sample at reservoir pressure conditions. The tomographic images were acquired at a voxel-resolution of 3.28 µm and time-resolution of 38 s. The data were collected at beamline I13 of Diamond Light Source, U.K., with the aim of investigating pore-scale processes during immiscible fluid displacement under a capillary-controlled flow regime. Understanding the pore-scale dynamics is important in many natural and industrial processes such as water infiltration in soils, oil recovery from reservoir rocks, geo-sequestration of supercritical CO2 to address global warming, and subsurface non-aqueous phase liquid contaminant transport. Further details of the sample preparation and fluid injection strategy can be found in Singh et al. (2017). These time-resolved tomographic images can be used for validating various pore-scale displacement models such as direct simulations, pore-network and neural network models, as well as for investigating flow mechanisms related to the displacement and trapping of the non-wetting phase in the pore space.

Thermochronological data from IODP Bengal Fan site 354. Grant abstract: The Himalayas are a type example of continent-continent collision, and resultant mountain building processes. Geologists can look at the rocks in the mountain belt itself to determine its evolution, but sometimes the evidence in the rocks in the mountain belt itself is obscured by later increases in the temperature and pressure that the rocks were subjected to, which overprints the evidence. Sediments eroded off the evolving Himalaya are deposited in the Bengal Fan, and these can provide an archive of the erosion of the history of the mountain belt through time which has not been obscured my later metamorphism, as the material was eroded and removed from the mountain belt prior to these later overprinting events. This project will analyse minerals that cooled as they were exhumed from deoth towards the surface in the mountain belt. The project will date the minerals to determine the time they cooled, and this will provide information on when the rocks were exhumed and how fast they exhumed, thus providing information on when and how fast the mountain belt grew.

This dataset includes the (stable) oxygen and carbon isotopic composition of benthic foraminifer tests (n= 686) and the (radiogenic) isotopic composition of the terrigenous fraction of marine sediments (n= 75), all sampled from Eocene to Oligocene-aged sediments recovered at Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Site 689 and 690 (Maud Rise, Southern Ocean)