U.S. Energy Department funds MIT sweet spot oil and gas project

U.S. Energy Department funds MIT sweet spot oil and gas project

The Department of Energy reports it will provide more than half of the funding for a $1 million MIT project aimed at helping oil and gas companies identify geologic ‘sweet spots’ in low-permeability oil and gas reservoirs, optimizing the placement of wells.

The award is part of a larger initiative by the DOE aimed at putting the latest in oil and gas technologies in the hands of America’s oil and gas companies. The agency has helped fund several similar projects over the past year.

The MIT project will use acoustic and 3-D seismic technologies to pinpoint the location of fractures in rock structures 6,000 feet to 10,000 feet below the ground, according to Nafi Toksoz, a professor of geophysics at MIT. Identifying those fractures will allow drilling companies to accurately place wells where gas or oil deposits in low-permeability rock formations, called “tight gas,” can be easily extracted.

After developing the required processing and interpretation methods, university researchers will work with Denver-based EnCana Oil & Gas Inc. to demonstrate these methods in Jonah field in Wyoming.

Tight gas, the largest of three so-called unconventional gas resources (the other two being coalbed methane and gas shales) is a major contributor to the nation’s natural gas supplies, and its importance is expected to grow.

Production of unconventional gas in the United States represents about 40 percent of the nation’s total gas output in 2004, but could grow to 50 percent by 2030 if advanced technologies are developed and implemented, according to DOE documents.

Source: www.bizjournals.com

Share this post