Nanotechnology advances to shed new light on reservoirs

Researchers at Rice University in Houston are coming closer to a nanotechnology application with far-reaching potential for the oil and gas industry. By injecting so-called “nanoreporters” into a reservoir, oil companies could zero in on more hydrocarbons, increasing recovery to feed the world’s growing energy appetite.

The nanoreporters are hundreds of millions of carbon clusters, each approximately 30,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. As they are pumped with water into a reservoir, the molecular makeup of the nanoreporters is designed to change depending on what they encounter — petroleum, hydrogen sulfide, water, or other substances, according to Jim Tour, professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Rice University and lead scientist on the project.

The particles are also being designed to measure other reservoir parameters such as temperature and pressure to further help operators pinpoint the location of oil and gas.

The nanoreporters have tags similar to bar codes on retail packages that will tell scientists how long they have been underground—three months, six months, nine months, or longer. Companies can then pinpoint where oil might be trapped. For example, if a large number of nine-month nanoreporters come across oil while three-month nanoreporters do not, scientists can assume the crude is deeper in the reservoir.

Major oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Marathon, are funding the multimillion dollar nanotechnology research program at Rice University in hopes that it will increase the amount of oil and gas extracted from reservoirs. Operators typically recover only about one in three barrels of oil from their fields, but they can’t afford to leave so much crude untapped at a time when it’s difficult to access new reserves. The vast majority of the world’s proven reserves—about 80 %—are held by national, state-run companies like PDVSA and Saudi Aramco.

Recovering more oil has major implications, both for the oil companies’ balance sheets and for the world’s diminishing supply. The International Energy Agency estimates that if oil companies were to increase oil recovery from the current 35% to 50%—a feasible goal with better detection and extraction tools—it would have the effect of doubling the world’s proven reserves of approximately 1.2 trillion bbl.

Tour states that his research team hopes to begin nanoreporter field tests in the next 12 months.

For more information about this and other nanotechnology research at Rice University, visit the James M Tour Group website.