Nano technology and the oil business
Feature Articles, Nov  27  2009 (Digital Energy Journal)

- We might never put robots in reservoirs, but nanotechnology can help out in plenty of other areas of the oil business – particularly enhanced oil recovery, better catalysts and reservoir surveillance, says Shell’s chief scientist Sergio Kapusta

The reality of nanotechnology is perhaps a little different to the expectations, but it is not hard to see some areas where it can make a big difference to the oil business, said Sergio Kapusta, chief scientist and manager engineering innovation and technology with Shell Global Solutions, in a luncheon talk during Aberdeen’s Offshore Europe exhibition.

Sergio Kapusta, chief scientist and manager engineering innovation and technology with Shell Global Solutions

Nano technologies have already been used to help make stronger and lighter materials, with improved corrosion / erosion resistance, for example in carbon fibre materials for aircraft. Nano technologies have also been used to make better membrane water filtration systems.

Nano technologies have been used to make better coatings, to make them more scratch resistant, or to make them oil wet or water wet (ie determine whether oil or water will stick to them preferentially).

In the oil business specifically, nanotechnologies could be used to make better catalysts for chemical reactions, or used for enhanced oil recovery (finding ways to push more oil out of the reservoir and into the wells), and for better surveillance (working out what is happening in the reservoir).

Still, nano technology materials are being priced at dollars per gram – a long way to oil company typical pricing models of cents per barrel. “So there are a couple of orders of magnitude to be reduced in the price.”

Plenty of other technologies have seen very fast cost reductions in the past, he said, and the same might happen with the cost of nanotechnology. For example, the price of digital calculators has fallen in recent years from very expensive to so cheap they are hardly worth charging for.

In-house expertise

Shell is making careful choices about which technologies it wants to develop in house and own - mainly technologies which will find their biggest application in the oil and gas industry, but might not be so useful to other industries.

The main area of nanotechnology which Shell is interested in are developing new catalysts for chemical reactions. “That’s where the core of the business is,” he said. “We will be there at the start.”

“We have an extensive research program looking at how to do better enhanced oil recovery,” he said.

Surveillance

Nano technologies could also be used for reservoir surveillance, tracking what happens in oil reservoirs between oil wells.

“We can’t see very far into the wellbore,” he said. “Seismic doesn’t have the resolution we would like. We don’t know where our injected chemicals are going. We take very wide guesses.”

This is analogous to a doctor working on a patient buried 5000m underground, with only two cables from the ground down to the patient, and no idea what was happening in between them, he said.

Medics are already using supermagnetic nano particles in human bodies, which can be interrogated as they pass through the body, providing data about parts of the body which have never provided data before.

It would be helpful if nano particles could be used inside reservoirs, for example to take enhanced oil recovery (EOR) chemicals to the right places, or help steer drill bits into oil reservoirs. “None of this is being done today. We have laboratory studies on core samples, but they are far from any actual realisation,” he said.

“It would be good if we could deliver emulsifier and foamer to precisely the place that it is needed- but we’re still far from that.”

Nano particles can act as antennas – so (for example) they could be designed to sit on the interface between oil and water, and tell people exactly where this interface is.

Another possibility is combining nanotechnology with biotechnology – which could enable biological chemicals already in the reservoir to act as ‘enhanced oil recovery’ chemicals, helping push more oil out.

Shell is part of a group of companies called the Advanced Energy Consortium, set up at the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, investigating the use of nano technology for reservoir surveillance.

Companies in the Advanced Energy Consortium are oil and gas companies (BP, Conoco Phillips, Marathon, Shell, Total, Petrobras, Occidental) and service companies (Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Schlumberger).

It is currently making studies on the flow of nano particles through rock – to estimate how much nano particles injected into one well could be retrieved from another well – for example if they were used for surveillance.

Studies have been made on small core samples, showing that all of the nano particles passed through the cores can be retrieved. But there is a big difference between core samples and an entire reservoir. “We don’t know what forces are in effect, many particles get stuck in the pores,” he said.

Nano robots

Mr Kapusta said that putting nano robots in reservoirs, an idea mentioned in the industry, “is more sci-fi than reality.”

Consider that oil and gas reservoirs typically contain pores which are 100nm to 1000 nm across (0.0001 to 0.001mm) – so any nano particles would need to be under 100 nano metres so they could move through the pores.

Designing a robot which can fit a power system, movement and data communications into 100 nm does sound quite hard – and even if it could be achieved, there is a question about the cost.

There would be a further question about how the data sent out by millions of tiny robots in the reservoir would be managed – and of course how the nano robot would survive in the harsh conditions of the reservoir.

Broader ideas

There are many broader ideas about how nano technology could help in the oil and gas industry, such as with improved coatings, sensors, water treatment. “These are more open,” he said.

Stronger materials could be useful in all areas of oil and gas industry – for example in making stronger downhole seals.

Nano enhanced materials can already be 10 to 20 per cent better than what went before, but Mr Kapusta expects a lot further development. “I expect 100 per cent improvement when we learn how to do these things,” he said.

In carbon capture, there have been developments of new materials with metal organic frameworks which can absorb carbon dioxide much better than any other material, he said. “But it is very expensive. The application for this are fantastic but we need to do it at lower cost. It can’t compete with traditional ways of carbon capture tools.”

Nano sensors can be developed which can determine the oil saturation in rock, by showing you were the oil-water interface is, or tell you what the acidity is.

Nanotechnologies could also have a less expected impact on the oil industry in terms of reducing demand for oil – by helping make better batteries for electric cars, or helping produce much lighter cars made of composite materials, which need less oil to propel them.

“I get articles every day about using nanotechnology to improve lithium batteries,” he said. “I expect you will see large improvements in lithium batteries in the next 5-10 years.”

A critical factor with batteries is how fast they can be charged up. “The speed of recharge increases as you decrease the size of the particles,” he said.

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