R&D

Even as the oil and gas industry looks for the next great idea to propel it forward, it should constantly reconsider past innovations for inspiration, the CEO of a major operator said Monday on the opening day of 2017 SPE ATCE.

One of the oldest drilling consortia in the world, The University of Tulsa Drilling Research Project, celebrates 50 years and is poised to continue its tradition for another 5 decades.

Techstars is partnering with Statoil to select the world’s 10 most promising energy innovators and entrepreneurs to participate in the Techstars Energy Accelerator program. Selected companies will be tasked with compressing 2 years of development work into 13 weeks.

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.