The DOE-NETL Environmental and Unconventional Oil Programs have expanded their portfolios of research and development projects with the addition of sixteen projects (seven Environmental and nine Unconventional Oil) that support the overarching goal of providing information and technologies to ensure sustainable, reliable, and affordable, supplies of domestic oil and natural gas in an environmentally acceptable manner. The projects will develop technologies for reducing the cost of environmental compliance and develop advanced technologies for primary and enhanced oil recovery with a primary focus on maximizing domestic unconventional oil resources.

The sixteen projects include the following efforts (if carried through all project phases).

Environmental Program

• ALL Consulting (Tulsa, OK)–The objective of this project is to create an internet-based water treatment technology catalog and decision tool to catalog existing and emerging produced-water treatment technologies to allow operators to identify the most cost-effective approaches for managing their produced water.
• Clemson University (Clemson, SC) –Researchers at Clemson University will develop “constructed wetlands” as a low-cost, low-maintenance method to improve the quality of produced water to meet discharge standards for beneficial use.
• Colorado School of Mines (Golden, CO) –The goal of this project is to develop data, tool sets, analytical models, and graphical user interfaces to facilitate stakeholder decision making related to oil shale resource development, and to facilitate environmental impact studies and cost estimates under a variety of different development scenarios.
• Utah Geological Survey (Salt Lake City, UT) –The objectives of this project are to (1) characterize regional aquifers to better facilitate water disposal permitting as well as protect fresh water resources and (2) identify water issues affecting conventional oil and gas recovery and possible oil shale development in the Uinta Basin, Utah.
• University of Alaska, Fairbanks (Fairbanks, AK) –This project will evaluate the use of artificial barriers to: prolong and augment lake water supply to ponds on the North Slope, prolong the recharge season for the lakes, help maintain a healthy water level for aquatic life, and at the same time enable ice road construction and compliance with new State and BLM requirements.
• University of Alaska, Fairbanks (Fairbanks, AK) –University of Alaska researchers will develop a water resources management solution tool for Alaskan North Slope oil and gas exploration that considers optimal water use, direct and cumulative environmental impacts, and multiple objectives and values among stakeholders.
• University of Wyoming (Laramie, WY) –In this project, investigators will determine the optimal methodology for irrigating crops with produced water treated via reverse osmosis or electro-dialysis. The goal is to facilitate the beneficial use of produced water while maintaining the long-term physical integrity of soils in the Powder River Basin, thereby allowing normal crop production to continue after produced water is no longer plentiful.

Unconventional Oil Program

• University of North Dakota (Grand Forks, SC) –In this project, researchers will measure geomechanical properties and determine in situ stresses within the Bakken Formation in the North Dakota Williston Basin in order to provide basic data needed to improve the success rate of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations in this region.
• Colorado School of Mines (Golden, CO) –In this study, the Colorado School of Mines will conduct an assessment of the hydrocarbon potential of the Bakken Shale in the Williston Basin and develop an integrated reservoir geo-model for this important formation. An improved understanding of Bakken Shale producibility is expected to reduce drilling risk and provide more accurate resource estimates so that operators can significantly improve recovery by optimizing drilling and completion strategies.
• Lumedyne Technologies Inc. (San Diego, CA) –The objective of this project is to build and demonstrate Lumedyne’s accelerometer technology for exploration and microhole seismic imaging. The goal is to develop a geophone that is low cost, exhibits high sensitivity, and has wide bandwidth sensors that can increase the resolution of seismic data.
• New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (Socoro, NM) –In this project, researchers will develop methods for using water-soluble polymers to recover viscous oil. The work is expected to extend the range of conditions (especially regarding the limits of oil viscosity) where polymer flooding can be used and to open opportunities for increased oil recovery in North Slope viscous oil reservoirs, particularly from the West Sak and Schrader Bluff waterfloods.
• Colorado School of Mines (Golden, CO) –This project will improve recovery of ANS heavy oil resources in the Ugnu formation by improving understanding of the formation’s vertical and lateral heterogeneities. Successful completion of the project will result in a capability for monitoring the progress of a heavy oil recovery process by seismic measurements over time.
• University of Alaska, Fairbanks (Fairbanks, AK) –Project researchers will collect the data needed to develop a robust geologic and engineering model that can be used to evaluate production methods for the Umiat field on Alaska’s North Slope. The Umiat field contains significant amounts of light oil in a frozen reservoir, and the development of effective production methods and strategies for such shallow unconventional resources would allow these resources to be recovered.
• University of Houston (Houston, TX) –The goal of this project is to develop improved oil recovery methods for the Ugnu viscous oil reservoir located within the Milne Point Unit on the Alaskan North Slope. Versions of alkaline-surfactant-polymer methods and colloidal dispersion gel particle methods will be evaluated for their displacement efficiency, sweep efficiency and recovery rate, and compared with conventional waterflood and viscosity reduction (water-alternating-gas) methods.
• University of Illinois (Champaign, IL) –This project will provide high resolution geologic and reservoir characterization to enable the design of an efficient alkaline-surfactant-polymer pilot flood to test this enhanced oil recovery technique’s potential for increasing recovery from the heterogeneous Bridgeport and Cypress sandstones in the Lawrence Field, Ill.
• University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS) –The goal of this project is to provide new technologies to independents oil producers to advance the widespread use of chemical flooding in Kansas, with potential extension of the results nationally. This laboratory and simulation study will screen and rate reservoirs as potential prospects for chemical flooding.