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December:
Cover Story:
Emerging technologies: Over the rainbow
What can a high-tech tennis racket teach the oil and gas industry? Read on.
Rhonda Duey, Editor, Exploration Editor, can be reached via e-mail at rduey@hartenergy.com
History is full of interesting technology transfer tales - how the same
technology that created the Jacqard knitting machine was later used for
computer punch cards in the 1960s and '70s, for instance, or how the
discovery of barometric pressure ultimately led to the invention of the
jet engine.
So for any industry that relies on technology to survive and grow, it
makes sense to keep an eye on seemingly unrelated strides being made in
other fields. The problem is that people who are on the cutting edge of
emerging technologies in their fields tend to be so focused, by
necessity, on some rather specific applications that they don't often
have the luxury of thinking in a more far-reaching sense about just
what this technology might be able to do in the larger scheme of
things. But some of the technologies that are being developed today
have such incredible promise that it seems that their only real
limitations will come from the imaginations of the people who create
and use them.
With imaginations firing on all cylinders, then, let's examine some of
the exciting new developments taking place in research and development
with an eye toward their potential application in the oil and gas
industry.
Visualization
Visualization is really not that new to the oil and gas industry -
visualization centers, "caves" and other immersive environments have
become almost routine at some of the larger oil and service companies.
But the concept behind visualization - the ability to truly respond to
the environment as a three-dimensional environment - is being studied
for a completely different purpose at the University of Colorado with
implications that could have a huge impact on the geoscience end of the
E&P industry.
Bill Bartling, senior director of energy and sciences for SGI, has
visited with a professor at CU named Mark Dubin, who works at the BP
Visualization Center. "The fundamentals are to use visual technology in
conjunction with functional magnetic resonance images (MRIs) to be able
to identify, for instance, the onset of Alzheimers and other kinds of
abnormalities in the brain," said Bartling. "But it's also for those
patients to use the visualization environment and other imaging tools
to remap the brain to work around the areas that have lost their
functionality."
Bartling, who recruited for Chevron prior to working at SGI, knows how
hard it can be to find even normal brains that can truly think in three
dimensions. Could a normal, intelligent but 3-D-challenged geoscientist
work with Dubin's techniques to learn to see in thee dimensions? That's
the hope. Bartling is trying to raise some money to develop a system to
train people in a variety of disciplines to interact with their
environments in 3-D. In addition to creating a race of
uber-geoscientists, there's plenty of potential in aerospace,
phamaceuticals, defense - the list goes on and on.
"I'm real excited about this because I think it's a huge breakthrough,"
Bartling said. "Why can one person find oil while the other person's
wells are all dry holes? It's just how our brains work."
Smart materials
While the term "smart" seems to be thrown at almost everything these
days, there is a group of materials known as "smart" materials that are
classified as substances that change some aspect of their physical
characteristic through the use of a stimulus such as electricity, heat
or magnetism. Research into smart materials has been going on for
decades, but their introduction into the marketplace has been more
recent. What's remarkable is the span of applications that are using
these materials.
Dr. Dimitris Lagoudas, Ford Professor of Aerospace Engineering,
associate vice president for research and director of the Texas
Institute for Intelligent Bio-Nano Materials and Structures for
Aerospace Vehicles at Texas A&M University, explained that a common
class of smart materials is a group called shape memory alloys, or
SMAs. One common SMA is an alloy called Nitinol, made of nickel (Ni)
and Titanium (Ti) and invented at what was then called the Naval
Ordinance Laboratory (NOL), now the Naval Research Lab. Nitinol has
found numerous applications in the biomedical industry because of its
ability to remember a shape it has been "taught" and return to that
shape when heat is applied.
A typical medical application is an artery stent. Stents are used in
patients whose arteries are blocked by plaque to help with blood
circulation. Typically, a stent is inserted in the artery and inflated
by a balloon procedure. Nitinol stents can be trained in the lab to
expand to the size of the artery. They're then collapsed and inserted
into the patient, whose body heat causes the stent to regain its former
shape.
Applications to the oil industry are obvious - downhole valves, for
example, that need to close when certain substances enter the wellbore.
And since heat isn't always the desired shape-changing stimulus in a
deep well, SMAs are also being trained to respond to other stimuli such
as a magnetic field.
Other characteristics include the ability to go from a stiff material
to a more compliant material. Lagoudas said this could be particularly
useful in vibration isolation technology.
Already the marketplace is full of devices that use some sort of SMA or
other smart materials. Toys can be bought that use them to simulate the
flight of a butterfly. Childrens' braces often use nitinol to retain
the desired shape of their teeth through body heat. Nursing homes use
the materials for safety purposes in the plumbing - if the water gets
too hot in the pipes, a valve automatically shuts off the water flow to
avoid burns. Exercise machines use smart materials known as
magneto-rheological fluids that change viscosity to alter the
resistance of the machine.
Other smart materials incorporate sensors into the material. For
instance, QinetiQ, a UK-based company that has been spun off from that
country's Ministry of Defense to commercialize its technology, is
experimenting with smart coatings that increase wear resistance and
reduce corrosion. But extra functionality is being introduced into the
coating by adding sensors and other technology.
"That sort of technology certainly is an area of interest for us," Andy
Treen, business group manager at QinetiQ, said. "In its broadest sense,
it's adding something extra to something that's already there. That's
our specialty with these materials, really - taking a material and
trying to make it work harder."
Already smart materials have found their way into oilfield
applications. A product called Terfenol-D is being used in PowerWave, a
downhole tool designed to increase production through the introduction
of acoustic energy. The tool has no moving parts, so it has a longer
tool life.
Fluids characterization
Multi-phase flow metering has become a source of significant interest
to the oil and gas industry in the past few years, but a new product is
being developed that will be in field prototypes within the next year
and could revolutionize the concept.
Based on NASA and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) technology, the
sensing method uses Swept Frequency Acoustic Interferometry in a
frequency modulated super-high frequency mode. Unlike conventional
metering approaches, it is almost completely non-invasive. According to
Charles Knobloch, interim chief executive officer of Leading Edge, a
subsidiary of Edge Technologies and the company commercializing the
technology, NASA was using it to measure cryogenic flow, while LANL was
examining its use for homeland security since it can detect the
contents of closed containers. Knobloch was unable to go into many
specifics about the technology due to patent and confidentiality issues
but said that the sensing mechanism is so sophisticated that it can
differentiate between two different types of soda by looking through
the cans at the contents.
The industry also needs to understand and simulate the nature of fluid
movement in a wellbore, reservoir or pipeline, and here it can borrow
technology being perfected by the motion picture industry. Ron Fedkiw,
an assistant professor in the computer science department at Stanford
University, has made the characterization of movement in nature -
smoke, fire, water, cloth, etc. - the focus of his research.
"We're designing new algorithms for interfaces, so when you have oil
and water together, for instance, what you really want is an accurate
way of simulating the interface between the two," Fedkiw said. "In the
oil industry, they're trying to get more accurate physics at the
interface, which then produces better results. If the physics are more
accurate, the graphics will look more real."
Another area of interface is between fluids and solid walls. Fedkiw
said technology used to create a special effect in the movie "Pirates
of the Caribbean," where a skeleton pirate drinks wine and it can be
seen moving through his ribcage, has applications to the movement of
fluids through a wellbore in terms of turbulent flow and eddy shedding.
Of course, a movie audience might not be quite as critical as a group
of production engineers. "You can be more cavalier in the special
effects industry," Fedkiw said. "Things don't have to work, they only
have to sort of work." But it also allows for a level of
experimentation that most oil companies don't have the luxury to
pursue, he said, opening the door to some interesting "accidental"
discoveries, one of the hallmarks of true innovation.
Operations enhancement
Automation is rapidly finding its way into the oilfield, with many
producing fields almost entirely automated so that they very seldom
require any human intervention. But Bartling sees an application here
for military "command and control" technology that takes that
automation to the next level.
"One of our biggest customers has already challenged us with ideas
about how they can manage their business 'by pictures,'" Bartling said.
"Right now they manage by the highest management getting together with
spreadsheets. That's how they run the company.
"They're one of the biggest oil companies in the world, but their financial performance trails their competitors."
Simply put, this new type of system maps the money flow into the
company through its assets in a real-time feed. "We've got command and
control systems at the infrastructure level," Bartling said, "the
screens and computers and databases and fiber-optic connectivity out to
the field. But the software layer that manages all these different data
streams hasn't been particularly well developed. A nice tech transfer
from the military would be this kind of interface, a subsurface/surface
integration along the flow of business, not just the static picture we
have today."
Another thought process that's still in its infancy is the concept of
downhole processing. "I've been in a number of meetings where people
ask why we even bring reservoir fluids to the surface," said Joe
Fischer, manager of corporate relations for MIT's Industrial Liaison
Program. "A lot of that is very ineffective - instead of bringing water
up along with hydrocarbons, then separating and reinjecting it, why not
move the refinery closer to the reservoir and perhaps not produce
fluids at all but rather electricity?"
Not a trivial task, to be sure. But advances in biotechnology, robotics
and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are all moving in the
direction of making things tinier, and it's not beyond the scope of the
imagination to foresee a time when the tools that currently operate in
a refinery could operate, in a much smaller fashion, downhole.
Researchers in MIT's Laboratory for Energy and the Environment are
quite enthusiastic about these notions, Fischer said.
One advance that could aid in this area is the concept of power
harvesting, capturing the existing energy in an environment and turning
it into electrical energy. Jonathan Gore, technology chief for
multifunctional materials at QinetiQ, said typical drilling and
production operations allow access to mechanical energy, vibrations,
pressure fluctuations, fluid flows and temperature, all of which could
potentially be turned into electrical power.
Stealth technology
At QinetiQ the need to detect submarines underwater, and prevent them
from being detected, has led to a host of useful non-military
applications as well. According to Mike Wright, group manager for
multifunctional materials, there are several ways to find a submarine,
including detecting its magnetic field, listening to its movements
through a hydrophone or sending pings through the water that bounce off
the submarine and indicate its location. All three of these methods
have led to the development of technology with potential oil and gas
applications.
The first two methods have been reviewed for their detection of fluid
flows in pipelines and other oilfield equipment. For instance,
hydrophones can be used in detecting leaks, as the water makes a
different sound forcing its way through the hole. (They've also been
used in marine seismic applications for years.)
Perhaps the most intriguing technology is the stealth material that's
been developed to prevent detection through pinging. "We cover our
submarines with a stealth material which is energy-absorbing, so it
doesn't reflect back the sonar energy; it just absorbs it," Wright
said. "We've found we can use this in sports equipment for vibration
damping. In a tennis racket, for instance, it could stop the shock wave
from traveling from the handle into the wrist." With drillstring
vibration causing huge headaches in wellbore construction and
measurement-while-drilling operations, this type of material could have
some very interesting oilfield applications.
Bionimetics
Bionimetics is the concept of mimicking nature through science, usually
with the hope of discovering a mechanical way of imitating something
unique about a certain species. Wonderful examples abound.
At MIT, the lowly tuna inspired Project RoboTuna in an attempt to
discover how tuna were able to swim twice as fast as their size, shape
and muscular structure would suggest. The study, guided by Professor
Michael Triantafyllou of MIT's Ocean Engineering Department, determined
that tuna were able to control the evolution of the vortices along
their bodies. By doing this they derive a propulsive force from these
vortices rather than being subjected to a resistive drag force.
RoboTuna researchers have also concluded that a simple flapping
mechanism is even more efficient than a propeller. "Some of us joke
that this is intuitive, because otherwise fish would have propellers,"
Fischer said.
Anything that has to do with vehicle propulsion in water is probably of
interest to the offshore oil and gas industry, and in particular some
of the RoboTuna lessons are being considered for autonomous underwater
vehicles (AUVs) to minimize their energy requirements.
Spin-offs of RoboTuna include a professor who is studying the seahorse
and its ability to maneuver so precisely underwater. Another group is
studying the waterbug, which is able to run across the surface of the
water even though there's no apparent resistance.
Researchers at QinetiQ joined a team from Oxford University studying
the Namibian desert beetle, a mystery because of its ability to survive
in incredibly arid climates with no obvious method of obtaining water.
"In this study they looked at the beetle's back," Wright said. "What
they found is that the surface of the exoskeleton has unique water
attracting and water repelling zones. When the beetle is in a fog, this
combination of zones creates active channels, channeling the water into
the beetle's mouth."
With a blueprint from Mother Nature and some relatively off-the-shelf
materials, Wright said, the team managed to mimic this channeling
effect in the lab and has produced a material that can be reproduced in
sheet form, turned into a mold or even printed onto other surfaces in a
fairly rapid way. "All of a sudden we have a very high-efficiency water
collection material with a phenomenal number of industrial
opportunities," he said.
Conclusion
Technology transfer can happen when people decide to find a new use for
an old idea, and it can happen when one industry's breakthrough finds
its way into other industries as well. At places like MIT, which
doesn't even have a petroleum engineering department, the number of
research projects that have primary or secondary applications in oil
and gas is mind-boggling. QinetiQ finds applications for its wide range
of technologies by exploiting them in a variety of industries.
But different sciences speak different languages, and even the sharpest
astrophysicist in the world might not fully understand how an oil well
gets drilled. So communication and collaboration are key ingredients.
"There's a chasm between technology and commercialization," Knobloch
said. "There are different languages used, and you have to get through
the language barrier to find the common concept of the technology. When
you understand the concept, then you can translate the language.
"Innovation is really a process of putting all the pieces together
rather than just inventing something and hoping someone will buy it."
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