Despite the common misconception, innovative technologies are not confined to renewable energy. They are driving changes in dirty hydrocarbons, too, indeed often making them far less dirty and far more efficient ways of supplying our energy needs.
Every few years in oil and gas, a new technology emerges which turns the industry on its head. The most recent example is the process known as "fracking," or hydraulic fracturing, which has opened up once inaccessible plays and transformed both the U.S. economy and global natural gas geopolitics. In the more distant past, the first use of LNG in the 1960s allowed producers to compress gas to 1 six-hundredth of its size and, for the first time, gave them the flexibility to ship gas to far-off markets without being limited by static pipelines.
The pace of technological change is quickening. This is in part because the low-hanging fruit in the oil and gas sector, the so-called era of easy oil, is gone. Many of the newest technologies are focused on getting every last drop out of mature fields, or on accessing hydrocarbons in hostile and complex environments, notably in deep and ultradeepwater. Brazil's Petrobras, which will spend $4.6 billion in research and development from 2011-2015, often leads the way.
At today's oil and gas conferences the truly exciting presentations are made not by the big name CEOs and economists but by the engineers, and the central theme is making drilling, refining and transporting "smarter." Here are my pick of the most exciting:
1. Platformless drilling
This one is straight out of "Waterworld." Engineers have been developing subsea compression systems, which would do away with the need for the above-surface rigs that have become icons of the oil and gas landscape. Instead, more of the construction facilities will be displaced to the seabed.
Although it sounds ambitious, these subsea systems could in fact reduce the cost of running an above-surface oil rig and accelerate production. Norway's Statoil has built the world's first full-scale subsea processing facility at its mature Tordis field, which has been producing in the North Sea since 1994. It hopes to improve the recovery rate from 49 to 55 percent.
Statoil's installations still rely on old platforms or vessels to serve as a power source, but as the technology develops these platformless facilities will become increasingly autonomous and will instead be linked directly to shore. The Brazilians, unlikely to be left behind, are also working with FMC Technologies to install subsea systems at their Marlim field.
With a much lower degree of human oversight, these are the "smart" rigs of the future.
2. Here come the robots
Advances in robotics are set to shake the foundations of oil and gas as much as other industries. They offer to take the heavy lifting out of oil rigs, and in the process speed up routine jobs by 25 percent. Oil and gas has never been good at mass employment, but it is entertaining to think of the difference in atmosphere if rigs were dominated not by brash and burly deckhands, but rather by bespectacled robot operators.
Startup companies such as California's Liquid Robotics and New York City's Honeybee Robotics have at one end of the spectrum developed 250-pound solar-powered floating robots to patrol offshore installations, and at the other tiny pipeline inspection robots, which can beam real-time images back to the surface without costly excavation.
The ultimate goal is to create fully automated operational systems where all of the components "talk" to each other and essentially run the rig on "autopilot." You might even find them patrolling the Norwegian subsea systems.
3. Big oil meets big data
Oil and gas has always been a datacentric industry. At the exploration stage, the more data geologists can collect on a contract area the better, and particularly offshore, where drilling a single rig can cost up to a billion dollars. Now they face unprecedented volumes of data from hundreds of sources, be they sensors on extraction equipment, offshore buoys or increasingly detailed seismic imaging equipment.
Better information means a competitive advantage, which is why Wood Mackenzie can charge thousands of dollars for their commercial reports. However, the greatest challenge is to detect patters and draw insights from the raw data to make better drilling decisions and react more quickly to potential failures.
One concept set to play a key part in data collection for oil and gas companies is "smart dust," the brainchild of the University of California, Berkeley's Kris Pister. If it sounds like the stuff of science fiction novels, that's because it is.
It is in fact the name given to the millions of tiny sensors, no bigger than a grain of rice, called micro electromechanical systems (MEMS), which Pister wants to scatter over the earth to create a web of data, feeding back real-time information on our environment. In the oil and gas sector, this would take the form of thousands of micro-sensors embedded into refineries, rock formations or other installations to detect movements and provide constant updates.
These new data collection possibilities help remove some of the unpredictability of nature. This will explain the attention paid to them by geologists, whose career is on the line if they drill a dry hole, or by BP, whose entire company was on the line when faults were not registered in time to stop the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010.
4. Advanced water treatment at fracking sites
This one may sound less sexy than robots, but can't be ignored. Fracking has become a dirty word among local communities and environmentalists, and one of their biggest criticisms is its water-intensive nature, particularly in arid shale-producing states such as Texas and China. Some report that each fracking well can use 2 to 5 million gallons of fresh water.
Between 10 and 50 percent of the water used in the process flows back out full of pollutants. Currently, the easiest option is to store this water deep underground in wells, but there is a strong trend towards recycling. Startup companies have answered the challenge of regulatory pressure by creating more advanced water treatment technologies.
Companies like Clean Membranes have been testing a process known as "membrane distillation," which uses a selective barrier to separate pure water vapor from salt water. Impending regulation is increasing investment in such on-site water treatment facilities.
Chemists have also been experimenting with the makeup of drilling fluids, including using foam containing nitrogen and carbon dioxide rather than water. Meanwhile, in South Texas, GasFrac Energy Services has been more ambitious in investigating the potential of waterless fracking, which instead of water injects high pressure propane (LPG) in gel form to frack wells. This gel then mixes with the oil and gas and can be used as a fuel itself.
5. Microbes that can "eat up" oil spills
Following on the heels of the engineers, the robot operators, the statisticians and the chemists are the biologists. They have been exploring the potential of using modified "super bacteria" at a later stage in the project cycle when things go wrong.
In the past, chemicals have been used to attempting to break down the oil particles in the wake of a spill, but that brings its own dangers. Instead, scientists have been genetically tweaking two different types of bacteria for their ability to break down hydrocarbons into fatty acids.
Some of these modified bacteria can remain active — albeit slower — at very low temperatures, meaning the Arctic is not out of reach. This is not a man-made process but simply the speeding up of a normal process constantly going on in the natural world to break down escaped oil.
The research remains inside the lab for now, and there are many questions to answer, such as how to avoid dangerously high levels of oxygen in the water. But the Deepwater Horizon disaster did much to spur investment in readying the technology for real-world events. That is, of course, if the robots fail in preventing the spills in the first place.
