A newly formed consortium aims to develop nanotechnologies that can characterize oil and gas reservoirs more comprehensively than the current means that rely largely on collecting near wellbore data.
The consortium envisions the oil and gas industry eventually having intelligent sensors with a size less than the width of a human hair, or in other words, sensor dimensions that range from hundreds of micrometers down to hundreds of nanometers.
Once injected in the reservoir, these sensors could collect and transmit data on the fluid and rock properties from any point in the pore space of a reservoir, and thereby facilitate additional hydrocarbon recovery.
The consortium
Scott W. Tinker, director of the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, told OGJ that he has been working on forming the Advanced Energy Consortium (AEC) for the last 3 years and last August one of the last hurdles was overcome when the US Department of Justice’s antitrust division announced that it did not oppose the venture’s formation.
AEC plans to develop but not commercialize the technology.
Tinker said, “The consortium provides a vehicle for this critical precompetitive research and sends a great message to young people that the industry is investing substantially and for the long term.”
Current members include BP America Inc., Baker Hughes Inc., ConocoPhillips, Halliburton Energy Services Inc., Marathon Oil Corp., Occidental Oil & Gas Corp., and Schlumberger Technology Corp. Tinker said each company made a 3-year, $3 million commitment to the consortium. The consortium does not receive any government funding.
BEG will manage the Houston-based AEC, while the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University, which has extensive nanotechnology expertise, will be a collaborative technical partner.
The consortium held its first workshop at Rice University on Jan. 8-9 at which materials scientists and electrical engineers discussed nanotechnology sensor and materials advances with petroleum engineers and geoscientists. AEC plans to hold the next meeting in March. With these and other meetings, AEC expects to develop a technology roadmap that will provide more specific targets and further narrow the focus of subsequent project solicitations.
AEC will solicit worldwide for competitive project proposals and will fund the most promising.
Sean Murphy, AEC manager, said in June the consortium may start soliciting Darpa-like (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) proposals for projects and expects to begin awarding competitive and international grants for the projects in September.
Murphy said AEC offers a low overhead because of its leverage with the University of Texas and BEG.
The consortium plans to focus its collaboration on projects with universities, national laboratories, other consortia such as Sematech, private companies, and the state of Texas.
Technology needed
As noted on a Rice University web site: “Research in nanoscience has advanced in the last decade because of the intellectual allure of constructing matter and molecules one atom at a time, and because the new technical capabilities permit creation of materials and devices with significant societal impact.”
The research has been in areas such as surface microscopy, silicon fabrication, biochemistry, physical chemistry, and computational engineering.
In the case of AEC, its primary focus will be on funding projects that propose nanosensors with a long development time. These research efforts would have to address communication, power, sensing, deployment, retrieval, and construction requirements.
AEC’s secondary focus is on projects that develop nanomaterials with near-term potential for enhancing hydrocarbon recovery. AEC says these proposals would leverage existing and new materials under development for other technologies such as biomedical, health, telecommunications, military, and national security. It notes that the petroleum industry already uses nanomaterials to strengthen and harden drilling equipment and as drilling fluid additives.
There remain many hurdles to surmount before nanosensors can effectively provide new insights on reservoirs. AEC says some of these include providing a power supply for the devices, device size, material durability in harsh environments (such as brines and clays), determination of sensor location in the reservoir, manufacturing scalability, reasonable costs, and overall economics.
The hurdles are many, but this step-change in technology may help recover the estimated 60% of the oil left in the ground using current technology.
