Statoil, GE announce Open Innovation winners, discuss collaborative effort to reduce water use

GE Oil & Gas in a collaborative effort with Statoil has selected five winners in a joint collaboration to accelerate sustainable technology. Specifically, the winners offered ideas on emerging technology to improve the efficiency of proppants and reduce truck traffic.

When crews stimulate an unconventional well, hundreds of truck trips carrying sand are required to bring proppant onto the site.

"You have to keep your focus on finding new and innovative solutions," Bruce A. Tocher, Statoil manager for shale oil and gas research, told UOGR in an October telephone interview from his Houston office.

Each winner was awarded an initial cash price of $25,000 and became eligible to receive additional funding from a discretionary $375,000 prize pool for potential development or commercialization upon meeting certain additional conditions.

Statoil and GE representatives in October scheduled meetings with the winners to determine whether GE, Statoil, or both companies together might want to work closely with each company to accelerate specific technology.

It's also possible that the collaboration might decide it's best for certain winners to continue working independently, Tocher said.

"We are very pleased," with the open-sourcing method of soliciting ideas, Tocher said. "We were surprised by the volume and quality of applications." He noted the open sourcing also attracted ideas from other industries beyond oil and gas.

A second GE-Statoil Open Innovation Challenge sought ideas for reducing water use for onshore development of unconventional oil and gas reserves. The second challenge also used open sourcing. Submission for the water challenge closed on Sept. 24.

Tocher said he was "blown away by the volume of interest" in the water challenge, and the winners for it were expected to be announced sometime after Thanksgiving.

The challenges solicit ideas for "industrywide approaches" Tocher said, adding that one winner of the sand challenge involved a solution that was very specific to the Bakken formation.

Winners named

For the sand challenge, a judging panel comprised of technical experts along with GE and Statoil executives previously evaluated more than 100 submissions from application in more than 30 countries and across a number of industries. The winners for ideas on improving proppant efficiency were:

• University of North Dakota Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) in Grand Fords, ND, for its lightweight, locally sourced ceramic proppant. Current ceramic proppants are made of high alumina content clays that are sourced in areas that are not located strategically to oil and gas basins. The EERC is developing a proppant that uses locally sourced rock as the base material. This product is 40% less dense than current ceramic proppants. Because it is lighter it is more buoyant and distributes better through the fractures, meaning less proppant should be required per completion.

• Bioastra Technologies of Montreal for its lightweight, expandable polymer proppant work. Bioastra is developing composite particles that swell up to 10 times their initial size in liquid. These beads are lightweight and extremely high strength. Much smaller in size than other proppants, they can fit into smaller fissures, and are also somewhat pliable and, to a certain extent, conform to the small cracks in the formation. The particles also are more buoyant, facilitating better suspension in fluid. This material is essentially similar to something first developed for artificial cartilage and occlusion agents for surgery.

• Bioploynet of Fredericton, New Brunswick, for its coiled biopolymer fluid additive, which makes fluid more viscous to increase the ability to support a solid. This would counteract the tendency for proppants to settle, making the proppant potentially more effective. It also makes the proppants slightly sticky, helping the particles to adhere to the surface of fissures in the formation. The formula of this can be customized to the mineralogy of a given formation. Currently this product is used as an application on sand dunes to prevent erosion.

• Hoowaki of Pendleton, SC, for its alumina ceramic proppant in the shape of an X compared with a typical ceramic proppant in the shape of a sphere. Developed with Shell, Hoowaki's unique X-shape proppant flutters as it moves through liquid, creating drag and reducing settling by up to 50% compared with sand. It also wedges better into fractures, which helps keep the fractures open and prevents the proppant from flowing back with the hydrocarbons and produced water. For its apparent density, this product is believed to be much stronger than most of the commonly used materials for proppant.

• Semplastics of Oviedo, Fla., for its lightweight polymer proppant. Today's proppants commonly are mined and then shaped and fired. Semplastics uses a liquid polymer cured to a solid state and then fired to make small spherical particles. These particles have half the density of sand, yet they are able to withstand extreme heat and have high corrosion and crush resistance.