Drilling advances

	Vol. 231 No. 4
JIM REDDEN, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Big indeed can come in the tiniest of packages

In what today seems like the Dark Ages, I attended a conference on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) in San Diego where I was handed a joystick and proceeded to send a Jules Vernesque gizmo gliding around a swimming pool. Well, not gliding, exactly; more like crashing into its walls. The thing that struck me then was how my son, who was a maestro at Pac-Man and all those other new-fangled video games that were all the rage at the time, could carve out a nice future for himself. But, alas, he threw it all away and got himself a PhD in physics and a cushy position at MIT.

That was my first hands-on experience with just how dexterous the oil field has been over the years in adopting elements of other, often very dissimilar, enterprises. Like the joysticks used to launch those then-revolutionary ROVs, a critical component of the latest class of deepwater seismic technology, for instance, also was borrowed from video games in the form of the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, which was developed specifically for next-generation gaming consoles. We also avail ourselves of technologies within disciplines that certainly cannot be considered child’s play, like medicine, for example. In a quid pro quo of sorts, cardiologists and oilfield scientists even meet side-by-side in Houston for a collaborative effort they call “Pumps and Pipes.” In one of the most recent conferences, a Methodist DeBakey Heart Center presentation on left ventricular assist devices preceded an ExxonMobil lecture on subsurface pumps.

Medical researchers also were among the very first to pounce on the opportunities in nanotechnology, but it didn’t take long for their oilfield brethren to join the party. While medical futurists envisioned tiny robots coursing through the human body like microscopic Lancelots, slaying all sorts of infirmities, their oil industry counterparts were a bit less quixotic, settling for such innovations as advanced reservoir characterization, longer, and stronger deepwater umbilicals and new-age drilling and completion fluids.

Quite simply, nanotechnology is the study of the properties and chemistries of matter at a very small scale. And, when we say “very small,” we are understating it by a few magnitudes of order. To put it into perspective, one sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers (nm) thick, and a single strand of human DNA is 2 nm
in diameter. A natural extension of microengineering nanotechnology, in a nutshell, is aimed at delivering more for less—much, much less.

The oil industry sees endless possibilities. For instance, in 2006, Australia’s University of Queensland unveiled the first oilfield application of nanotechnology in the form of nanosensors capable of penetrating the tiniest of rock pores to identify reserves left behind after primary recovery. Elsewhere, in 2005, H2Oil Corp. and PetroChina’s Huafu Oilfield Chemical Co. built a joint venture manufacturing plant in Tianjin, China, for a liquid nanotechnology fuel additive. The plant employs what H2Oil calls “NanoGhost” technology to produce enough additives to treat 25 billion gallons of fuel a year. H2Oil President Richard Hicks said  that using nanotechnology will enable China to produce “some of the cleanest and most energy-efficient gasoline and diesel fuels in the world.”

In 2007, the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at the University of Texas formed its Advanced Energy Consortium (AEC), focused on the application of nanotechnology similar to that being investigated in Australia. The AEC, which counts among its membership Baker Hughes, BP, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton, Marathon, Occidental, Schlumberger, Shell and Total, said its goal is to develop subsurface nanoscale sensors that can be injected into wells. These sensors would migrate out of the wellbores and into the pores of the surrounding geological structure to collect data about the physical characteristics of hydrocarbon reservoirs.

Houston-based NanoRidge Materials Inc. and co-participants Technip, Duco and Rice completed a one-year study that examined the use of nanotechnology to design ultra-high-conductivity deepwater umbilicals. NanoRidge believes the use of emerging carbon nanotechnology could enable power delivery to the seafloor where light weight and extremely high currents are required. The public-private Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA) provided partial funding for the research project.

Basically, the investigation entailed the development of an electrical conductor suitable for use in subsea umbilicals with conductivity much greater than copper and allowing for tieback distances approaching 100 miles. NanoRidge says that using carbon nanotubes imbedded in a polymer conductor can yield conductivities that are 100 times that of copper alone.

NanoRidge Product Development Engineer Lori Jacob said a prototype has been developed and lab tested. She said additional information will not be released until REPSA completes its review of the final report.

M-I Swaco also sees enormous potential for nanochemistry in drilling and completion fluids. Late last year, it put up $460,000 to fund a two-year joint study with Rice University. Today, the company is collaborating with both Rice and the University of Texas on what Vice President of Research and Engineering Jim Bruton said is an examination of different nanochemistries and their potential applications in the oil field. For now, the company is keeping its work close to the vest, but Bruton said the possibilities are intriguing.

“Right now, we are in the pure research stage, so we don’t want to reveal too much on what we are doing. But, we feel nanotechnology indeed has applications in drilling and completion fluids as well as material science,” he said.

When I look at the mind-boggling technologies under development today and juxtapose those with the perennial crew change we’ve been hearing about for years, I can almost visualize a future where some 12-year-old techno-whiz deftly pushes buttons that enable him or her to adjust weight-on-bit or fluid properties on a rig thousands of miles away. Of course, that will have to wait until he or she blows up a cyborg with a cyber-missile.