Consortium to examine nanotechnology for energy explortation
Cox News Service
Thursday, January 17, 2008
AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas is managing a new research consortium that aims to find ways to use nanotechnology to recover more oil and gas from existing oil fields.
The Advanced Energy Consortium will be backed by seven major oil-related companies that have agreed to invest $1 million a year each for the first three years of the program. The supporting companies had to get clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice to work together.
They are BP America Inc., Baker Hughes Inc., ConocoPhillips Co., Halliburton Energy Services Inc., Marathon Oil Corp., Occidental Oil and Gas and Schlumberger Ltd.
UT's Bureau of Economic Geology will coordinate an expected international research effort to develop ways that nanomaterials and tiny sensors can be used to harvest more oil from existing oil fields and to monitor oil reservoirs from deep underground. Current recovery methods typically leave about 60 percent of the oil underground.
Rice University, which is a leading player in nanotech research, will be a collaborative technical partner.
Much unrecovered oil sits inside tiny holes in porous rock formations. Researchers think nanomaterials might be useful in pushing oil out of those rocks.
The new materials are expected to be used in conjunction with today's oil recovery methods, which include the injection of steam, other gases or fluids into oil fields.
The materials being considered include tiny carbon structures called fullerenes that are sometimes referred to as buckyballs or buckytubes. Rice University researcher Richard Smalley, who died in 2005, was a co-discoverer of fullerenes in 1985.
The consortium also wants to spur the development of tiny, rugged micro and nano sensors that could be injected into oil fields to actively monitor a reservoir.
Such sensors would be as small as a few hundredths of the size of a human hair and would be able to withstand the high temperatures and harsh conditions that exist thousands of feet underground in an oil field.
Scott Tinker, director of UT's Bureau of Economic Geology and a managing director of the consortium, said it will conduct a series of technical forums this year to develop a technology road map and narrow the focus for soliciting research proposals.
Researchers at UT and Rice are expected to be involved in the program, but research grants are to be awarded on a competitive bid basis to teams that include top international nanotech scientists.
Wade Adams, who heads Rice's Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, said the consortium will bring together nanotechnology experts and geological sciences experts to work on a challenging problem.
"We've got a lot of researchers working on application areas" for nanotechnology, Adams said, "They haven't been thinking about oil and gas because no one has put up money to pay for it. This is a big step forward."
Kirk Ladendorf writes for the Austin American-Statesman.
