What can a high-tech tennis racket teach the oil and gas industry? Read on.

History is full of interesting technology transfer tales - how the same technology that created the Jacqard knitting machine was later used for computer punch cards in the 1960s and '70s, for instance, or how the discovery of barometric pressure ultimately led to the invention of the jet engine.
So for any industry that relies on technology to survive and grow, it makes sense to keep an eye on seemingly unrelated strides being made in other fields. The problem is that people who are on the cutting edge of emerging technologies in their fields tend to be so focused, by necessity, on some rather specific applications that they don't often have the luxury of thinking in a more far-reaching sense about just what this technology might be able to do in the larger scheme of things. But some of the technologies that are being developed today have such incredible promise that it seems that their only real limitations will come from the imaginations of the people who create and use them.
With imaginations firing on all cylinders, then, let's examine some of the exciting new developments taking place in research and development with an eye toward their potential application in the oil and gas industry.
Visualization
Visualization is really not that new to the oil and gas industry - visualization centers, "caves" and other immersive environments have become almost routine at some of the larger oil and service companies. But the concept behind visualization - the ability to truly respond to the environment as a three-dimensional environment - is being studied for a completely different purpose at the University of Colorado with implications that could have a huge impact on the geoscience end of the E&P industry.
Bill Bartling, senior director of energy and sciences for SGI, has visited with a professor at CU named Mark Dubin, who works at the BP Visualization Center. "The fundamentals are to use visual technology in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance images (MRIs) to be able to identify, for instance, the onset of Alzheimers and other kinds of abnormalities in the brain," said Bartling. "But it's also for those patients to use the visualization environment and other imaging tools to remap the brain to work around the areas that have lost their functionality."
Bartling, who recruited for Chevron prior to working at SGI, knows how hard it can be to find even normal brains that can truly think in three dimensions. Could a normal, intelligent but 3-D-challenged geoscientist work with Dubin's techniques to learn to see in thee dimensions? That's the hope. Bartling is trying to raise some money to develop a system to train people in a variety of disciplines to interact with their environments in 3-D. In addition to creating a race of uber-geoscientists, there's plenty of potential in aerospace, phamaceuticals, defense - the list goes on and on.
"I'm real excited about this because I think it's a huge breakthrough," Bartling said. "Why can one person find oil while the other person's wells are all dry holes? It's just how our brains work."
Smart materials
While the term "smart" seems to be thrown at almost everything these days, there is a group of materials known as "smart" materials that are classified as substances that change some aspect of their physical characteristic through the use of a stimulus such as electricity, heat or magnetism. Research into smart materials has been going on for decades, but their introduction into the marketplace has been more recent. What's remarkable is the span of applications that are using these materials.
Dr. Dimitris Lagoudas, Ford Professor of Aerospace Engineering, associate vice president for research and director of the Texas Institute for Intelligent Bio-Nano Materials and Structures for Aerospace Vehicles at Texas A&M University, explained that a common class of smart materials is a group called shape memory alloys, or SMAs. One common SMA is an alloy called Nitinol, made of nickel (Ni) and Titanium (Ti) and invented at what was then called the Naval Ordinance Laboratory (NOL), now the Naval Research Lab. Nitinol has found numerous applications in the biomedical industry because of its ability to remember a shape it has been "taught" and return to that shape when heat is applied.
A typical medical application is an artery stent. Stents are used in patients whose arteries are blocked by plaque to help with blood circulation. Typically, a stent is inserted in the artery and inflated by a balloon procedure. Nitinol stents can be trained in the lab to expand to the size of the artery. They're then collapsed and inserted into the patient, whose body heat causes the stent to regain its former shape.
Applications to the oil industry are obvious - downhole valves, for example, that need to close when certain substances enter the wellbore. And since heat isn't always the desired shape-changing stimulus in a deep well, SMAs are also being trained to respond to other stimuli such as a magnetic field.
Other characteristics include the ability to go from a stiff material to a more compliant material. Lagoudas said this could be particularly useful in vibration isolation technology.
Already the marketplace is full of devices that use some sort of SMA or other smart materials. Toys can be bought that use them to simulate the flight of a butterfly. Childrens' braces often use nitinol to retain the desired shape of their teeth through body heat. Nursing homes use the materials for safety purposes in the plumbing - if the water gets too hot in the pipes, a valve automatically shuts off the water flow to avoid burns. Exercise machines use smart materials known as magneto-rheological fluids that change viscosity to alter the resistance of the machine.
Other smart materials incorporate sensors into the material. For instance, QinetiQ, a UK-based company that has been spun off from that country's Ministry of Defense to commercialize its technology, is experimenting with smart coatings that increase wear resistance and reduce corrosion. But extra functionality is being introduced into the coating by adding sensors and other technology.
"That sort of technology certainly is an area of interest for us," Andy Treen, business group manager at QinetiQ, said. "In its broadest sense, it's adding something extra to something that's already there. That's our specialty with these materials, really - taking a material and trying to make it work harder."
Already smart materials have found their way into oilfield applications. A product called Terfenol-D is being used in PowerWave, a downhole tool designed to increase production through the introduction of acoustic energy. The tool has no moving parts, so it has a longer tool life.
Fluids characterization
Multi-phase flow metering has become a source of significant interest to the oil and gas industry in the past few years, but a new product is being developed that will be in field prototypes within the next year and could revolutionize the concept.
Based on NASA and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) technology, the sensing method uses Swept Frequency Acoustic Interferometry in a frequency modulated super-high frequency mode. Unlike conventional metering approaches, it is almost completely non-invasive. According to Charles Knobloch, interim chief executive officer of Leading Edge, a subsidiary of Edge Technologies and the company commercializing the technology, NASA was using it to measure cryogenic flow, while LANL was examining its use for homeland security since it can detect the contents of closed containers. Knobloch was unable to go into many specifics about the technology due to patent and confidentiality issues but said that the sensing mechanism is so sophisticated that it can differentiate between two different types of soda by looking through the cans at the contents.
The industry also needs to understand and simulate the nature of fluid movement in a wellbore, reservoir or pipeline, and here it can borrow technology being perfected by the motion picture industry. Ron Fedkiw, an assistant professor in the computer science department at Stanford University, has made the characterization of movement in nature - smoke, fire, water, cloth, etc. - the focus of his research.
"We're designing new algorithms for interfaces, so when you have oil and water together, for instance, what you really want is an accurate way of simulating the interface between the two," Fedkiw said. "In the oil industry, they're trying to get more accurate physics at the interface, which then produces better results. If the physics are more accurate, the graphics will look more real."
Another area of interface is between fluids and solid walls. Fedkiw said technology used to create a special effect in the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean," where a skeleton pirate drinks wine and it can be seen moving through his ribcage, has applications to the movement of fluids through a wellbore in terms of turbulent flow and eddy shedding.
Of course, a movie audience might not be quite as critical as a group of production engineers. "You can be more cavalier in the special effects industry," Fedkiw said. "Things don't have to work, they only have to sort of work." But it also allows for a level of experimentation that most oil companies don't have the luxury to pursue, he said, opening the door to some interesting "accidental" discoveries, one of the hallmarks of true innovation.
Operations enhancement
Automation is rapidly finding its way into the oilfield, with many producing fields almost entirely automated so that they very seldom require any human intervention. But Bartling sees an application here for military "command and control" technology that takes that automation to the next level.
"One of our biggest customers has already challenged us with ideas about how they can manage their business 'by pictures,'" Bartling said. "Right now they manage by the highest management getting together with spreadsheets. That's how they run the company.
"They're one of the biggest oil companies in the world, but their financial performance trails their competitors."
Simply put, this new type of system maps the money flow into the company through its assets in a real-time feed. "We've got command and control systems at the infrastructure level," Bartling said, "the screens and computers and databases and fiber-optic connectivity out to the field. But the software layer that manages all these different data streams hasn't been particularly well developed. A nice tech transfer from the military would be this kind of interface, a subsurface/surface integration along the flow of business, not just the static picture we have today."
Another thought process that's still in its infancy is the concept of downhole processing. "I've been in a number of meetings where people ask why we even bring reservoir fluids to the surface," said Joe Fischer, manager of corporate relations for MIT's Industrial Liaison Program. "A lot of that is very ineffective - instead of bringing water up along with hydrocarbons, then separating and reinjecting it, why not move the refinery closer to the reservoir and perhaps not produce fluids at all but rather electricity?"
Not a trivial task, to be sure. But advances in biotechnology, robotics and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are all moving in the direction of making things tinier, and it's not beyond the scope of the imagination to foresee a time when the tools that currently operate in a refinery could operate, in a much smaller fashion, downhole. Researchers in MIT's Laboratory for Energy and the Environment are quite enthusiastic about these notions, Fischer said.
One advance that could aid in this area is the concept of power harvesting, capturing the existing energy in an environment and turning it into electrical energy. Jonathan Gore, technology chief for multifunctional materials at QinetiQ, said typical drilling and production operations allow access to mechanical energy, vibrations, pressure fluctuations, fluid flows and temperature, all of which could potentially be turned into electrical power.
Stealth technology
At QinetiQ the need to detect submarines underwater, and prevent them from being detected, has led to a host of useful non-military applications as well. According to Mike Wright, group manager for multifunctional materials, there are several ways to find a submarine, including detecting its magnetic field, listening to its movements through a hydrophone or sending pings through the water that bounce off the submarine and indicate its location. All three of these methods have led to the development of technology with potential oil and gas applications.
The first two methods have been reviewed for their detection of fluid flows in pipelines and other oilfield equipment. For instance, hydrophones can be used in detecting leaks, as the water makes a different sound forcing its way through the hole. (They've also been used in marine seismic applications for years.)
Perhaps the most intriguing technology is the stealth material that's been developed to prevent detection through pinging. "We cover our submarines with a stealth material which is energy-absorbing, so it doesn't reflect back the sonar energy; it just absorbs it," Wright said. "We've found we can use this in sports equipment for vibration damping. In a tennis racket, for instance, it could stop the shock wave from traveling from the handle into the wrist." With drillstring vibration causing huge headaches in wellbore construction and measurement-while-drilling operations, this type of material could have some very interesting oilfield applications.
Bionimetics
Bionimetics is the concept of mimicking nature through science, usually with the hope of discovering a mechanical way of imitating something unique about a certain species. Wonderful examples abound.
At MIT, the lowly tuna inspired Project RoboTuna in an attempt to discover how tuna were able to swim twice as fast as their size, shape and muscular structure would suggest. The study, guided by Professor Michael Triantafyllou of MIT's Ocean Engineering Department, determined that tuna were able to control the evolution of the vortices along their bodies. By doing this they derive a propulsive force from these vortices rather than being subjected to a resistive drag force.
RoboTuna researchers have also concluded that a simple flapping mechanism is even more efficient than a propeller. "Some of us joke that this is intuitive, because otherwise fish would have propellers," Fischer said.
Anything that has to do with vehicle propulsion in water is probably of interest to the offshore oil and gas industry, and in particular some of the RoboTuna lessons are being considered for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to minimize their energy requirements.
Spin-offs of RoboTuna include a professor who is studying the seahorse and its ability to maneuver so precisely underwater. Another group is studying the waterbug, which is able to run across the surface of the water even though there's no apparent resistance.
Researchers at QinetiQ joined a team from Oxford University studying the Namibian desert beetle, a mystery because of its ability to survive in incredibly arid climates with no obvious method of obtaining water. "In this study they looked at the beetle's back," Wright said. "What they found is that the surface of the exoskeleton has unique water attracting and water repelling zones. When the beetle is in a fog, this combination of zones creates active channels, channeling the water into the beetle's mouth."
With a blueprint from Mother Nature and some relatively off-the-shelf materials, Wright said, the team managed to mimic this channeling effect in the lab and has produced a material that can be reproduced in sheet form, turned into a mold or even printed onto other surfaces in a fairly rapid way. "All of a sudden we have a very high-efficiency water collection material with a phenomenal number of industrial opportunities," he said.
Conclusion
Technology transfer can happen when people decide to find a new use for an old idea, and it can happen when one industry's breakthrough finds its way into other industries as well. At places like MIT, which doesn't even have a petroleum engineering department, the number of research projects that have primary or secondary applications in oil and gas is mind-boggling. QinetiQ finds applications for its wide range of technologies by exploiting them in a variety of industries.
But different sciences speak different languages, and even the sharpest astrophysicist in the world might not fully understand how an oil well gets drilled. So communication and collaboration are key ingredients.
"There's a chasm between technology and commercialization," Knobloch said. "There are different languages used, and you have to get through the language barrier to find the common concept of the technology. When you understand the concept, then you can translate the language.
"Innovation is really a process of putting all the pieces together rather than just inventing something and hoping someone will buy it."