5 Ways Technology Can Aid in the Oil & Gas Industry
As with other industry sectors, the Oil & Gas industry is leveraging new technology to improve its processes and repurpose waste materials. There are a number of new technologies that are being used by innovative companies to help them work better and smarter. This is a fact proven by the doubling of extractive industry patents from 2005 to 2010. Oil companies which use new technology for their strategic investments include Stratoil Ventures, Energy Technology Ventures, KPC Ventures, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron and NRG. Here are some of the ways these O&G companies are using new technology.
New Technology Will Help Access The Inaccessible
A growing number of O&G companies are using new technology to go to remote places that they have never been before. For instance, BP has used new technology in a number of ways that helped them access the once inaccessible. This company initially projected that it could only recover 40 percent of the oil in the Alaskan Prudhoe Bay. But it upgraded its projection by 60 percent using new technology. A new tech enables BP engineers to create small cracks on the rocks so that the flow of trapped natural will be induced. Another new tech enables them to inject salt water to a tank so that trapped oil in rocks will be pushed out.
New Technology Will Efficiently Treat Wastewater
GE is also using new technology that enables them to forego the process of transporting water for disposal or treatment and from diluting the wastewater that comes from fracking. This new technology utilizes the desalination process called membrane distillation. The process vaporizes the wastewater by combining heat and reduced pressure and forcing the liquid waste into membranes where salt water and pure water vapor are separated.
Software For The Oil & Gas Industry
Software developers are creating web-based applications that can serve as visualization platforms for O&G companies. These O&G companies can use these apps to measure, track and manage the entire data that they receive from their oilfields around the world. One industry insider has described this new technology as the digital oilfield where all the parts are integrated and are in communication with one another, as the human body is.
This digital oilfield was described clearly by a McKinsey Report. It stated that the digital oilfield is where instruments are constantly reading data on mechanical systems, pipelines and wellhead conditions. And then this data is examined by groups of computers. The results from these computers will be fed to real-time centers of operations which will then modify their oil flows so that oil production will be optimized and downtimes minimized.
New Technology Will Repurpose Waste Matters Into Energy Sources
New technology will enable O&G companies to repurpose their oil resources. They will be able to turn waste into energy by using new technology. SunCoal is a company that can turn organic waste into carbon-neutral coal. Organic waste can include chicken manure, straw and garden compost. Another example is Enerkem. This company is using an innovative tech that uses waste materials instead of petroleum.
Fractal Systems is another company that repurposes one resource into another more convenient and valuable resource. This company is upgrading the quality of bitumen and heavy oil. Bitumen and heavy oil are greater in density than crude oil. Refining them is more expensive and creates more pollution. But there are more available quantities of these two than light crude so they are also used heavily. Another example is Agilyx, a company that uses a technology that can turn plastics into petrochemicals and synthetic crude oil. They heat the plastic to turn it into gas, and then condense this gas into liquid form, where they can now separate the hydrocarbons.
New Technology Will Reduce The Harmful Effects Of Hydrocarbons
New technology is being developed to make the consumption and production of hydrocarbon fuel less destructive to the environment. O&G companies like GeoPure Hydro Technologies and PW Absorbents are trying to solve this problem by treating the wastewater from natural resources extraction. Other O&G companies are focusing their efforts on reducing the demand on oil instead of just increasing the supply. An example of this is Cerion Energy, an O&G company that produces diesel fuel from nanotechnology process that reduces consumption by 8 percent and reducing emissions at the same time.
