R&D

Renewable energy is often framed as being at odds with the oil and gas industry, but new price developments in the wind and solar sectors may be changing this paradigm, according to one US energy expert.

In an effort to foster collaboration in an area where there is currently very little, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) created a new web-based application for storing and sharing CT images of rocks.

The Bakken Petroleum System, which includes the Bakken and Three Forks shales in North America, is estimated to hold as much as 900 billion bbl of original oil in place.

Created by the Institute for Energy Technology in Norway in 1979, Olga was the oil and gas industry’s first transient multiphase flow model. A source of national pride, the program has been declared one of the country’s most important innovations in recent decades.

An ongoing research project started nearly 3 years ago by the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) is shedding new light on what really happens to foamed cement as it is pumped deep down offshore wells during completions.

A project spearheaded by Exxon­Mobil, Shell, Chevron, and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has been established to advance separation technology through improved testing methods and collaboration between users and suppliers.

It has been an impressive comeback for a technology that once stood on the brink of failure. The upstream oil and gas industry has largely resolved crippling technical challenges that shortened the life of fiber-optic cables in downhole applications and is now working on a big encore.

DuPont is ramping up the commercial-scale implementation of its microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) method after nearly a decade of development and testing of what it says is a low-risk way to improve production from mature fields.

After a year of field testing, a new type of biopolymer developed by Wintershall, Germany’s largest oil and gas producer, is showing promise as an effective enhanced oil recovery (EOR) tool in one of the country’s longest producing oil fields.

Over the next decade, the number of electrically powered subsea systems in operation around the world will increase as companies adopt new technologies to produce oil and gas offshore more efficiently.