LARAMIE — Oil wells today still leave most of their resources trapped in the ground. Between 85 and 95% of the resources remain in tight oil rocks which will not release their black gold.

Cracking the code to extract even another 1 percent of these rocks is worth billions of dollars to the oil and gas industry, and it’s an area in which Wyoming has quietly taken a global lead.

In fact, Wyoming is so far ahead in this area that ThermoFisher Scientific, an applied science research firm and Fortune 500 company, just made a $40 million bet that the Cowboy State will be the location for the next great innovation in the field of oil and petroleum. gas extraction occurs.

ThermoFisher’s $40 million bet was supplemented by another $40 million from the Wyoming Legislature, for a total of $80 million that will go to the Directed Flow-Through Porous Media Innovation Center by Dr. Mohammed Piri of the University of Wyoming High Bay Research Center. .

Piri told Cowboy State Daily that the money would be used to acquire new scientists and instruments, as well as corresponding software to integrate artificial intelligence on huge three-dimensional data sets from Wyoming and other oil areas and gas.

The results of this ongoing work will not only be a game changer for Wyoming oil and gas companies. This will be a game changer for the world.

“These resources are so vast, so incredible in volume that a 1 or 2 percent recovery is just a huge incremental saving,” Piri said. “Can you imagine if, especially with the wells that we’ve already fracked, we have a lot of them.

“The idea is to use this technology to better understand how these fluids are trapped and how they can be mobilized, and then recover them. Even 1 or 2 percent will be huge, not just for Wyoming, but for the country.

How to Squeeze a Rock Sponge

The shale and sandstone rock formations where oil and gas are found in places like the Powder River Basin in Wyoming appear impervious to the naked eye at first glance.

In fact, geologists believed for decades that the oil in these rocks would never be recovered.

But appearances are deceiving, and in reality these so-called tight oil rocks are riddled with tiny holes called pores. Their size varies from a few nanometers at the smallest to a few micrometers at the largest.

The tiny pores are where all the oil and gas get trapped. It’s a bit like a sponge, except that unlike a sponge, these rocks are very hard. They are not easy to squeeze at all.

This required some clever tricks to extract every last bit of oil from these vast reserves, and that’s where horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing came into play.

By drilling laterally into these formations for one or two or even three kilometers, oil wells can access a larger surface area of ​​tight oil rocks than by drilling vertically as in conventional oil wells.

But the well still won’t get much oil. This requires the injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids, which introduce thousands of tiny breaks into oil-bearing rocks.

The well is now ready to produce.

Even with these techniques, it takes extremely high pressure to force the oil or gas out of these hard rock sponges. This is why the existing oil and gas extraction process only exploits 5-15% of the resource, leaving the rest aside.

See the invisible

When it comes to extracting more oil trapped in tight rocks, one of the biggest challenges holding back engineers and scientists is simple but difficult logistics.

There is no real way for the human eye to see what is happening at the bottom of a hydraulically fractured well.

And that’s where Piri’s work shines.

“Oil companies give us samples of rocks and their fluids, and we can test them,” he said. “We can put it under pressure and temperature and then watch how the fluid moves through it.”

However, the term “look” is perhaps a bit of an overuse here. Piri actually refers to electron microscopy, which uses a beam of electrons to observe objects so tiny they are on the atomic scale.

By recreating the underground conditions of oil wells and observing what happens under an electron microscope, Piri can create a sort of three-dimensional model of oil wells, allowing scientists and engineers to see how things flow and what is really happening in these depths. , underground places where wells are drilled.

Not just oil wells

With this understanding, a well can be put to the test, testing different ideas to see how the system could be modified to extract a little more oil.

“Then we can tell the company that maybe they can adjust their process this way,” Piri said. “Then you can recover more oil.”

Piri’s work doesn’t just apply to oil wells.

It can also provide insight into other fluids that move through underground rocks, such as carbon dioxide for carbon storage and underground storage of hydrogen as a fuel.

Wyoming has already been a leader in carbon sequestration for decades. Piri’s work could further position the state as a leading hub where large amounts of carbon can be stored underground for companies that want to reduce their emissions.

Neighboring North Dakota is pursuing a similar strategy that fits into its oil and gas industry where, in theory, the state could one day claim that its barrels of oil and gas are not only zero carbon, but net negative.

Wyoming research leads the world

Given that even 1 or 2 percent additional oil extraction is worth millions of dollars for a given well, the potential for Piri’s cutting-edge work is enormous, and that’s one of the reasons ThermoFisher Scientific chose to partner with the University of Wyoming.

“We collaborate with many different universities around the world,” Dan Shine, senior vice president of ThermoFisher Scientific’s Analytical Instruments Group, told Cowboy State Daily. “We came here and saw the incredible groundbreaking research that Piri is doing and when we partner with different universities, different professors, it’s really about where are the market leaders? What are the market demands from leaders who have a better vision of where the domain is going and then integrate that into our product roadmap.

Shine predicts that the techniques Piri developed will work in many industries, not just oil and gas.

“These are very general tools,” Shine said. “You know, (three scientists) recently won the Nobel Prize (in chemistry) for recently studying the atomic structures of proteins. So this (electron microscopy) technology actually serves many different industries.

One of ThermoFisher’s interests is the green energy transition.

“When we think about some of the uses around carbon sequestration and increased oil recovery from existing fields, and just hydrogen batteries,” he said. “This technology can support the energy transition in many different ways, as well as a cleaner and more sustainable environment.

“And that ties into our mission, where we enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer, and this collaboration will help us support that mission.”

Renee Jean can be reached at [email protected].