Serious research into the potential for nano-engineered products is well underway and oil and gas applications could just be around the corner. Nanotechnology, or nanoscience, is referred to by the United Kingdom's Institute of Nanotechnology as, "The description of all activities at the level of atoms and molecules that have applications in the real world." A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. For comparison, a billionth of meter is 1/80,000th of the diameter of human hair, or 10 times the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Although the concept of sub-atomic engineering still seems more science fiction than science-fact, the reality is that at least one oil major has backed research into benefits nanotechnology might bring to its business.

Andy Garland, technology consultant at the UK Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Stirling Innovation Park in Scotland, explained, "Nano-particles are in catalysts so they have been in the oil industry for quite a while," he said. "We are working with one of the major oil companies - one of the biggest in the world - looking at new technologies."

Nanotechnology could benefit material sciences, but also the wider energy field, with the development of solar power cells - photo-voltaics, among other things. Previously, E&P reported nanotechnology might help engineer better material coatings to reduce friction and improve the energy efficiency of engines. Garland asserts nanotechnology will benefit oil and gas operations in the years to come.

"It is not only speculation, but some of it is a bit down the line. There are a lot of technologies that will benefit from nanotechnology such as materials science, such as stronger materials for drilling and platforms," Garland added. "Studies recently suggested some of the benefits might be with us within 10 years."

Garland sees lots of potential for nanocomposites, where nanontechnology is used to engineer materials with improved strength for less weight: "This would make a huge difference to the design of oil platforms," he said.

Nanotubes - microscopically engineered carbon fiber tubes - might create lighter, stronger and more corrosion-resistant structural materials for oil and gas offshore drilling while other nano-tools could be designed to sense and identify or delineate hydrocarbon reserves, Garland suggested.
Nano-catalysts in refineries with differing pore sizes and shapes could optimize crude processing while other nano-catalysts could reduce viscosity and sulfur content in crudes.

He suggested nano-lubricants could provide ultra-thin coatings by condensing a gas onto a surface, thus reducing friction, while surface-mounted nano-particles in fluids could be used to enhance hydrocarbon recovery.

Chemicals could be better designed for oil production enhancement, microscopic metering systems could be built and nano-carriers could locate and retrieve hydrocarbons.

ExxonMobil is taking the science seriously by investing manpower in the discipline, particularly for its downstream operations. Tom Degnan is director of ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company's petroleum sciences laboratory in Annandale, N.J. He told Exxon's The Lamp magazine that some of his staff have become nanotechnology architects, designing and building catalysts - used for 90% of refinery processes - which can accelerate operations and lower energy requirements. These catalyst molecules can be engineered to "select" which chemicals they allow into a reaction. "We know how to engineer catalysts at the nanoscale with different pore sizes and shapes," Jeff Beck, director of ExxonMobil's catalyst technology laboratory, told the magazine.

One catalyst, zeolite, can remove wax from crude oil and Exxon has worked to make this process more efficient, using the fact that waxy crudes contain long, thin molecules which tend to stick together, while less waxy crude contains irregularly shaped molecules which flow more easily. Exxon's new zeolite catalyst has pores less than a nanometer wide - allowing thinner molecules through, but excluding bulkier ones.

"We make the zeolite pores just big enough for one waxy hydrocarbon molecule at a time to pass through," Beck told the magazine. Inside the catalyst, thin waxy hydrocarbon molecules rearrange themselves without losing or adding atoms. Suitably-shaped hydrocarbon molecules bypass the zeolite pores.

Rao Bangaru, a senior staff metallurgist, reported that Exxon has also used Nanotechnology to improve the strength of pipeline steel.

"We have produced a steel that is 50% stronger than what is commercially available."

A mile-long section in the TransCanada Pipeline utilizes this specially-engineered "nano-steel" which was installed in conditions -41?F (-40?C).

Leading

Houston's Rice University in Texas, has been at the leading edge of the science with a specialized research facility, the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST). Here Dr. Wade Adams CNST's director, has been researching the benefits Nanotechnology might bring to industry.

Many materials can benefit from nanotechnology, said Adams. Gradually, nano-materials will evolve with nano-alloys, combining nano-textures in titanium, and other nano-composites be developing. This could evolve into the provision of casing and tubing and piping. "There are more than 100 products already on the market which use nano-technology," Adams said. Some are simple applications of the technology - such as wine-proof fabrics and coatings for sunglasses. Other commercial applications are appearing in car bumpers and tennis balls.

"The drilling industry and the oil and gas industry is working in areas that will certainly take advantage of research that will make stronger materials available," Adams said.

Nano-additives could be introduced to enhance drilling mud properties.

Some of these new materials could be super-conductive, he suggested, so oil and gas applications could entail greater data retrieval through embedded sensors, "...In the materials that you use to make [drill] bit assembly."

Duplicity of information becomes possible, and, "You get reliability with duplicity."

With the super-conductivity of a nano-material, much more power could be transmitted downhole, compared with a copper cable, involving much less weight. "With nanotechnology, the cable will be much lighter, and it will carry much more power down on it. You could have electrically powered bits. You could conceivably drill with plasma or laser - vaporizing the rock." But he cautioned, "Those are revolutionary ideas, that are not going to come tomorrow."

Nano-explosive technology - already explored for military use - could provide 100 times more cutting power for the same weight of explosive, for example perforating casings.

Adams talks of greater power storage, too. "Stronger batteries with nano-structured electrodes would be 10 times better than lithium batteries - you may never have to come out of a hole to replace them."
Advances in information technology offer the industry more possibilities - the trend towards micro-computing means much more data storage is possible, Adams said. "When you get to the point of terabyte CDs, that can change the way you think about the way information is stored. In principle you can store a petabyte on a disc." Large oil companies are estimated to have up to 8 petabytes of data. One petabyte equals 1,024 terabytes and 1 terabyte is 1 trillion bytes of data. Putting all of ExxonMobil's corporate data onto a single information disc is a staggering possibility from nanotechnology.

Keen

Apart from the United States and the United Kingdom, Adams said Norway has been keen to progress nanotechnology. "All the major suppliers - Baker Hughes, Schlumberger - they all have areas of nanotechnology research and development right now. The question of how much research is going to be done by either the Department of Energy [in the US], or in the UK is up in the air." But large corporations will undoubtedly enter this arena of science, Adams said, "Because the payoffs are so huge."
In September 2004, collaborating with chemist Dr. Richard Smalley, director of Rice's Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory (CNL) and a 1996 Noble prize-winner, Adams described how they had learned how to produce continuous macroscopic fibers comprising single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), just one atom thick.

In an article on the Rice research - financed by the US Office of Naval Research and the Department of Energy - and taken from the science journal Macromolecules, Adams, Smalley et. al., explained how they created SWNTs in 102% concentration sulfuric acid to produce SWNTs in a concentration of up to 10% by weight. Previously it was only possible to obtain a SWNT concentration of only 1% in a water and detergent solution - which would not be commercially viable.

Carbon nanotubes tend to stick together in "hairball-like clumps," and are therefore difficult to manipulate, according to Jade Boyd, science editor at Rice and who reported the work done by Adams and Smalley. Achieving a much higher concentration of SWNTs makes the nanotubes much more suitable for industrial processing. Because of the strength of carbon, this represents a huge breakthrough in materials science, raising the eventual possibility of building structures - such as offshore platforms, jackets, and perhaps even downhole drilling equipment - with much lower mass, and much greater strength. Using SWNTs as building blocks, Nanotechnology fibers, which are 10 times stronger than Zylon - currently the world's strongest commercially available material and twice as strong as Kevlar - could be made. It has also been suggested carbon nano-tubes could have 100 times the strength of steel and one-sixth the weight.
"The SWNT fiber project is one of the "holy grails" of nanotechnology - to spin a pure single-walled nanotube fiber with the highest strength of any fiber possible," said Adams in a research paper co-authored with Smalley and others, detailing the progress they have made, as reported by Boyd.

"SWNTs are predicted to have tensile strengths many times that of Zylon or Kevlar, based upon the much greater theoretical strength of the single molecule carbon nanotube. However, unlike Zylon and Kevlar, SWNTs are also excellent conductors of electricity and heat. This unique multi-functionality makes them candidates for many critical applications beyond structural ones," Adams stated.

Boyd also suggested these new materials could allow drilling at deeper depths, for example. Potentially, these materials could also be "smart," by permitting new sensing and diagnostic functions in downhole tools.

In August the United Kingdom awarded US $32.22 million for nano-research and the UK Department of Trade and Industry estimated the global market for nanotechnology is worth $1.79 trillion. That's big money for small technology.

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