In April, the US National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) launched an Oil and Gas Center of Excellence (OGCE) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to focus its research efforts on addressing some of the domestic upstream industry’s biggest technical challenges.
The OGCE is part of a drive by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) goal to create more engagement pathways between NETL and industry and academic institutions.
Representatives from Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, EQT, Range Resources, and Expand Energy attended the center’s opening, along with delegates from Halliburton and Baker Hughes. Simon Seaton, SPE’s CEO and executive vice president, also participated.
The OGCE joins two of the DOE’s other centers of excellence, one that will serve the coal industry and another that is dedicated to critical minerals and advanced alloys. A fourth center, aimed at supporting the budding geothermal industry, is planned to open soon.
Alexandra Hakala, acting director of the OGCE, told JPT in a recent interview that the center’s overarching mandate is to help “significantly advance the needle” on oil and gas technologies that will strengthen US energy security and resiliency.
Hakala explained that NETL’s oil and gas research has historically been distributed across multiple programs, whereas the newly established OGCE is intended to consolidate that work under a more integrated, multidisciplinary framework. Operating under the DOE’s Office of Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy (OHGE), the Pittsburgh‑based center has identified several priority areas to guide future research.
Outlining those priorities, Hakala said, “We need to increase recovery factors. The second one is we need to reduce breakeven operational costs. The third is that we need to treat produced water as an economic resource.”
Additional objectives include evaluating more efficient options for transporting produced water to processing facilities, as well as research into power, fuel, and chemical solutions. One new project within that scope is focused on improving or developing gas‑powered turbine technologies.
OGCE Is NETL’s New ‘Front Door’ to Industry
As the OGCE takes shape, Hakala said the center is placing greater emphasis on outreach and direct engagement with industry.
“A big part of what we’ve been charged to do as the center of excellence is to get out there and meet with people and invite people and companies to come visit us at the lab with an open exchange on the challenges they’re seeing,” she said.
Hakala said these exchanges can take many forms at NETL and within the OGCE. In some cases, the challenges span multiple basins and operators. In others, the technical challenges raised by industry are specific to individual developments or formations, but even narrowly focused solutions may have broader value across the business.
As the OGCE engages with industry, Hakala said the collaboration models can be tailored to fit those needs. Arrangements may range from simple nondisclosure agreements to enable data or sample sharing, to more structured joint industry projects led by the OGCE and supported by its laboratory resources.
As an assistant secretary in the DOE, Kyle Haustveit leads the OHGE and oversees NETL’s research and development portfolio. He characterized NETL’s new centers of excellence as the “front door for industry to engage with our world‑class national laboratory system and researchers.”
Haustveit, a 15‑year SPE member and former subsurface manager and venture executive at Devon Energy, emphasized to JPT that industry engagement and public-private partnerships are critical to keeping NETL’s work aligned with operator priorities. That approach, he said, supports the development of commercially viable technologies that can improve US production.
“American innovation unlocked the shale revolution, transforming the domestic and global energy landscape; this is what can happen when the right minds are empowered to solve problems,” he shared.
As an example, Haustveit pointed to DOE–supported Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site (HFTS) projects, which involved multiple shale producers and university researchers. The HFTS work, covered in numerous SPE papers, generated new datasets that improved the industry’s understanding of fracture behavior and contributed to improved horizontal well stimulation practices.
Hakala said that beyond industry engagement, the OGCE is also working to build stronger ties with other national laboratories and US universities. Those efforts will include an expanded schedule of workshops and collaboration with academic institutions to help “build the next-generation workforce” needed to sustain US oil and gas production.
More Shale EOR Researching Coming
Looking forward, one of the OGCE’s primary research areas is enhanced oil recovery (EOR), specifically how to apply it to unconventional reservoirs, which represent more than two-thirds of US output.
Hakala noted that much of NETL’s previous work on EOR in unconventional reservoirs focused on CO2 injection. She cited a recent study evaluating CO2‑soluble surfactants (URTeC 5223), where a central question was whether improved recovery resulted from rock wettability alteration or from reductions in interfacial tension.
“Turns out, for that study, with the surfactants applied, it was more about the wettability alteration,” she said, adding that understanding such recovery mechanisms helps define what questions to ask next and what additional experiments are needed.
“We’re continuing along that line of research, not only with CO2 but with looking at other fluids that can be injected,” she said, noting that some of this research was recently presented (SPE 231513) at the SPE Improved Oil Recovery Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She added that the OGCE is setting up laboratory space to enable study of a much broader suite of injection materials than NETL has examined to date.
The OGCE is expanding its experimental toolkit with new instrumentation to help answer questions about which EOR approaches may be effective under different conditions.
Hakala said some of the technologies already in use, including a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer for fluid behavior analysis, are difficult for most operators—and even many third-party commercial labs—to access.
According to Hakala, the NMR instrument “has been a very powerful tool to help us understand water-based fluid location versus a hydrocarbon-based fluid location.” She explained that the NMR technology can even distinguish between different types of hydrocarbons as they flow through cores and other test systems.
It’s this type of information that can be used to help inform what might work or happen when a particular EOR injectant is used at the reservoir scale.
Another priority for the OGCE is expanding its experimental throughput. Hakala noted that many traditional laboratory studies, such as coreflood experiments, are often run one at a time or in limited batches. She said the center is now working to develop workflows that allow it to “get as many experiments running at one time so that we can get answers as quickly as possible.”
New Options for Produced Water
Outside of EOR, another area the OGCE is stepping up is research and development efforts, including the issue of produced water. Though produced water is a challenge across the oil and gas spectrum, its scale and cost profile poses distinct challenges in the unconventional business.
“You either have a lot of water to deal with, like in the Permian Basin, or you have water that’s really expensive to deal with, like in the Appalachian Basin,” said Hakala.
NETL’s goals for produced-water research are similar to its EOR efforts. Within the OGCE, NETL is looking to expand the types of produced‑water treatment experiments it can accommodate and is exploring building a pilot‑scale system that would allow industry partners to test emerging treatment technologies.
Past work has included a platform called AquaTrade, which helps match produced-water supplies from hundreds of operators with sources of demand and transportation options. NETL also has worked to create other specialized databases for produced water, incuding one that offers detailed biological and geochemical data for US oil and gas reservoirs with the aim of helping identify aboveground water-treatment options.
Another area Hakala said she is particularly interested in is the use of inline sensors to reduce the time required for produced‑water analysis and to better understand how water properties change as fluids move through individual treatment components.
“We’re also thinking about what it is going to take for different end users to be able to accept a treated produced water, and how can we fill in some the gaps there,” she said .
On this front, the OGCE sees a role for itself in not only helping energy companies, but also in helping public stakeholders understand produced-water chemistries, so that alternatives to saltwater-disposal-well injection, such as beneficial reuse in industrial or agricultural use cases, may become more viable.
Another option under consideration is resource recovery from produced water. The OGCE is collaborating with NETL’s Critical Minerals Center of Excellence to evaluate emerging technologies for lithium extraction. Hakala noted that bromine, another valuable commodity present in many produced‑water streams, is also an area of research interest.
To learn more about NETL and the OGCE visit the center’s website here.
For Further Reading
URTeC 5233 CO2-Soluble Surfactants for Enhanced Oil Recovery From Shale by L.C. Burrows; F. Haeri; D. Tapriyal; P. Lemaire; P.G. Shah; A. Alenzi; RM. Enick; D.M. Crandall; and A. Goodman.
SPE 231513 Comparing Huff-N-Puff Oil Recovery in Unconventional Shale Cores With CO2 Alone Against-Low Concentration Solution of 2EH-PO5-EO10 in CO2 Using NMR Spectroscopy by M.P. Grindle; D. Tapriyal; L. Burrows; R. Enick; and A. Goodman.
