Release Date: August 15, 2001

TULSA, OK - America's best hope for slowing or perhaps halting the decline in domestic oil production may be new technologies that locate oil previously missed, produce oil that today's processes leave behind, and ensure that tomorrow's producers can meet strict environmental standards.

With the President's National Energy Policy calling for continued public-private partnerships to develop new oilfield technologies, the Department of Energy plans to add 12 new projects in three categories to its ongoing petroleum research program.

The projects were selected in the first round of a broad-ranging solicitation issued last December by the department's Office of Fossil Energy. Another round of project winners will be announced later this year.

The projects named today will be managed by the National Petroleum Technology Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the oil research arm of the Energy Department's National Energy Technology Laboratory. The office oversees a cooperative program with industry and universities to develop improved technologies that can extend the life of marginal fields and improve access to the billions of barrels of unproduced oil remaining in the Nation's reservoirs.

The selected oil-related research projects are listed below under their technology topic areas: [click on project name for more details]


Oil Technology: Reservoir Efficiency Processes

This area addresses the need to access oil not recoverable by conventional methods by developing improved methods of gas, chemical and microbial flooding for light oil recovery.

• New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM, will study ways to improve processes for injecting carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out oil that remains trapped after conventional recovery processes are completed. Researchers will attempt to improve the "sweep efficiency" of CO2 floods ? i.e., the extent to which the CO2 spreads out as it moves through the reservoir ? and examine a technically advanced approach that combines CO2 and foam to improve the effectiveness of CO2 flooding. A successful project will result in more efficient CO2 flooding and expand the range of reservoirs amenable to CO2 flooding.

  The Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $1 million for this three-year project, and New Mexico Tech will contribute $500,000 in cost sharing. The project contact is Dr. Reid B. Grigg at 505-835-5403.

• Texas Engineering Experimental Station (TEES), Texas A&M, College Station, TX, will examine artificially fractured cores of reservoir rock using X-ray Computerized Tomography. The objective is to determine why CO2 often bypasses oil in reservoirs that are naturally fractured or in which producers have created fractures. The results will be applied to achieve a more efficient CO2 flood and reduce the amount of oil being bypassed in fracture-dominated reservoirs.

  Texas A&M will provide cost sharing of $234,000 to the three-year project, and the Department of Energy will contribute federal funding $937,000. The project contact is Dr. David Schechter at 979-845-2275.

• University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, will develop polymer gel systems that will penetrate deeper into the reservoir and are specially formulated to reduce the amount of water that is often produced along with oil. Polymer gels are thick solutions made up of long-chained chemical molecules that are injected into a reservoir to break oil droplets loose from surrounding rock and move them through a reservoir. The use of polymer gels has been limited because current gels do not have the ability to penetrate long distances into the reservoir. Developing better polymer gel treatments will not only improve their effectiveness in producing oil but also help the environment by reducing the amount of produced water brought to the surface.

  The Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $691,000 for the three-year project, and the University of Kansas will contribute $500,000 in cost sharing. The project contact is Dr. Paul Willhite at 785-864-2906.

• California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, will develop low-cost surfactants - a soap-like chemical - that can reduce the tendency of oil droplets to cling to surrounding rock. A special focus of the project will be to develop surfactants that can tolerate high concentrations of salty brines that exist in many U.S. oil reservoirs.

  California Tech will provide cost sharing of $180,000 for the three-year project, and the Department of Energy will contribute federal funding of $720,000. The project contact is Dr. Yongchun Tang at 909-468-9310.

Critical Upstream Advanced Diagnostics and Imaging Technologies

Technologies in this area address the need for improvements in the way geophysical data are acquired, processed and interpreted. This can help increase producers' ability to measure the properties of reservoir rock and tailor oil recovery methods to be most effective in a specific type of reservoir. These technologies could also improve the ability to predict the results of advanced oil recovery processes, especially important in making economic decisions to apply higher-risk technologies.

• Advanced Resources International, Houston, TX, seeks to advance the state of measurement, processing and interpretation technologies primarily by tying together data obtained on a broad scale from 3-dimensional seismic technologies and on a smaller scale from individual well logs. Integrating this data could lead to seismic technologies that have much greater resolution than today's state-of-the-art systems.

  Advanced Resources will contribute $271,000 in cost sharing to the 24-month project; and DOE will provide federal funding of $750,000. The project contact is Scott Reeves, at 713-780-0815.

• Rock Solid Images, Houston, TX, will develop new tools for measuring reservoir properties that will combine the latest understanding of how the inelastic nature of rocks is influenced by rock type, the microstructure of pores throughout the rock, and the type of fluid that fills the pores. Researchers will study how changes in seismic signals can be calibrated to well log information and used to pinpoint the best locations for drilling wells.

  The Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $789,000 to this 24-month project, and Rock Solid images will contribute $197,000 in cost sharing. The project contact is Dr. M. Turhan Taner at 713-783-5593.

• The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, will focus on a category of oil reservoirs, called "turbiditic reservoirs," formed in the deep Gulf of Mexico. Although these reservoirs could be likely sources of new U.S. petroleum reserves, oil production is difficult and expensive. University researchers will develop a new method they hope will reveal more accurate information on the characteristics of the rock layers that make up these reservoirs. Based on computer simulations of how sediment-laden flows deposited the sand and silt that ultimately formed these reservoirs, the researchers hope to construct a profile of an entire reservoir and use it to run simulations of various oil recovery processes.

  The University of Texas will contribute $233,000 in cost sharing to the 36-month project, and the Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $649,000. The project contact is Roger Bonnecaze at 512-471-1497.

• The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, will study how changes in the stress levels inside an oil reservoir can affect the way oil and other fluids move through reservoir rock. Fractures in reservoir rocks often allow oil and gas to move more easily to production wells, but fractures can also short-circuit production when they divert fluids away from the desired pathways. Researchers will use X-ray Computed Tomographic (CT) imaging to study how pressures that hold fractures open inside an oil reservoir decline as oil is produced, and how stress levels in the rock build up and often force fractures to close.

  Penn State will provide $110,000 in cost sharing for the 36-month project, and the Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $440,000. The project contacts are Abraham S. Grader at 814-865-5813, Phillip M. Halleck at 814-863-1701, or Derek Elsworth at 814-865-7659.

• Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX, will focus on carbonate oil reservoirs common to the Permian Basin of West Texas and elsewhere in the U.S. Data from a Permian Basin reservoir will be compared to geologically similar outcrops in the Sierra Diablo mountains of West Texas, and a high resolution, more geologically realistic computer model of the reservoir will be developed. Companies will be able to use to the model to determine the best way to apply such technologies as horizontal wells, CO2 injection, infill drilling (drilling between existing wells), and other oil recovery methods.

  The Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $500,000 to the 24-month project, and BEG/UTA will contribute $504,000 in cost sharing. The project contact is Stephen Craig Ruppel at 512-471-2965 or -1534.

• Palo Alto, CA, will focus on understanding better the "signatures" of seismic waves at the microscopic level in reservoir rock. Using a technique called "Acoustic Miscroscopy," researchers will use sound waves to map and quantify the microstructure of oil-bearing rocks, measuring how the acoustic signals are changed as they move through and across the individual grains that make up the rocks. Integrating knowledge about a reservoir rock's microstructure will an understanding of the sedimentary processes that formed the rock, and the elastic properties of the rock will allow oil producers to better interpret seismic images and to link geologic models to the actual oil-producing properties of a reservoir.

  Stanford will contribute $115,000 in cost sharing to the 36-month project, and the Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $450,000. The project contact is Dr. Gary Mavko at 415-723-9438.
  
  

• University of Houston, Houston, TX, will study ways to improve the resolution of "vertical seismic profiling" (VSP). VSP measures the velocities of sound waves in rock layers from inside a well. A seismic source is positioned on the surface next to a well, and a geophone inside the borehole is raised to measure seismic signals at various depths. VSP provides higher resolution images that techniques that rely solely on surface techniques to measure seismic reflections. University researchers will team with an independent oil and gas company in tests over an onshore Louisiana salt dome.

  The Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $777,000 to the 24-month project, and the University of Houston will contribute $435,000 in cost sharing. The project contact is Dr. Kurt Marfurt at 713-743-9119.

Oil Technology: Oil & Gas Environmental

This area addresses the need for reducing compliance costs and improving environmental performance by providing lower-cost compliance technologies, providing a sound scientific basis for cost-effective, risk-based regulatory decisions, and improving access to public lands and sensitive environments by demonstrating environmentally protective technologies.

• Ground Water Protection Research Foundation, Inc., Oklahoma City, OK, will make available to industry its Risk-Based Data Management System for oil and gas production- and injection-related activities to streamline permitting on state and federal lands, reduce the cost of environmental compliance, and develop user-friendly, on-line reporting techniques.

  The Department of Energy will provide federal funding of $2,451,000 for the three-year project, and GWPRF will contribute $612,500 in cost sharing. The project contact is Ben Grunewald at 405-516-4972.

Funding amounts for these projects are preliminary and subject to negotiation.