DOE aids studies of subsurface imaging tools

The U.S. Department of Energy has selected seven research projects to improve the oil industry's diagnostic and imaging tools that produce portraits of underground reservoirs.

The projects will provide $2 million and share in DOE funds totaling $6 million.

They will develop advanced geoscientific instruments, ranging from nuclear magnetic resonance to laser imaging, that will produce high-resolution data on the geometry of a reservoir and the characteristics of the way fluids flow through the reservoir rock. Some of the work will be on advanced computer software that can generate more accurate and reliable geologic models and simulations of oil reservoirs and recovery processes.

The selections are the first in five major petroleum-related research competitions being sponsored by DOE's National Petroleum Technology Office in Tulsa. Unveiled last spring, the competitions are intended to provide the core of DOE's cooperative research program with U.S. producers (OGJ, Apr. 20, 1998, p. 41).

Projects

• Rice University will use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)well logging technology to analyze how fluids interact with reservoir rock surfaces to design new oil recovery processes.
• Texas Engineering Experiment Station at Texas A&M will use NMR spectroscopy and imaging technology to analyze critical reservoir rock properties to simulate fluid flow for more efficient oil recovery process designs. DOE said NMR is of great interest to engineers and geologists, because it is the only logging tool that estimates permeability.
• Southwest Research Institute will study improved methods to predict fluid characteristics and flow patterns to more accurately model reservoirs.
• New Mexico Tech's Petroleum Recovery Research Center will research a fluid's spreading across, or attraction to, a solid surface and how oil flowing through a reservoir is affected by other fluids and by a variety of rock and mineral surfaces.
• The University of Texas at Austin will study how the interactions of oil and other fluids with rock mineral surfaces and injected fluids affect oil flow through the reservoir and will provide ways to use the collected information for better reservoir fluid flow models.
• The University of Houston will develop improved laboratory centrifuge testing methods to determine how efficiently oil drains through a reservoir and model the resulting laboratory data.
• Purdue Research Foundation will use advanced laser imaging, micro-modeling technology, and rock core analyses to gather detailed measurements on the interactions of oil with other fluids and with rock mineral surfaces and injected fluids that affect the oil flow through a reservoir.

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