Michael Smallwood, chief technology officer with Planet Resource Recovery, adds a drop of PetroLuxus to water. The chemical separates oil from sands quickly, bringing oil to the top.
Posted on 09/03/2008 7:04:07 AM PDT by thackney
Michael Smallwood looks more like a roadie than a scientist, sporting a shoulder-length silver mane, and jeans and a T-shirt rather than a white lab coat.
But he's spent nearly two decades tinkering with a gel-like chemical compound that squeezes oil from rock, sand, dirt and whatever else it clings to. That could pay off now that his boss and benefactor, Kurt Neubauer, saw enough promise to found a company to make the substance and market it.
"Discovery is the most important part of science," said Smallwood, chief science officer for Neubauer's startup, Planet Resource Recovery.
With Smallwood's creation in hand, the company is jumping into the heady realm of enhanced oil recovery, a well-established industry now offering a potential boon to innovators who find ways to squeeze more crude from mature wells as well as those long since capped and left idle.
Jim Steidtmann, director of the Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute at the University of Wyoming, was unfamiliar with the Houston startup, but he said it has plenty of company. High oil prices have inspired a vast flurry of efforts to develop new technologies that can better extract more oil from existing wells.
"There's a lot of oil that's stranded, stuck in reservoirs that geologists know is there. It's not that they're out there with a lot of risk trying to find oil," he said. "The issue is trying to figure out how to free it from the pore space and get it out of the ground."
Gary Pope, director of the Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert in enhanced oil recovery, said companies big and small are researching ways to get more out of what's already been tapped.
The main push now is unlocking safe uses of chemicals...
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Michael Smallwood, chief technology officer with Planet Resource Recovery, adds a drop of PetroLuxus to water. The chemical separates oil from sands quickly, bringing oil to the top.
This stuff reminds me of the Drag Reducing Agent used in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
No gunk for oil!
Solut Green....works best with liberals...particularly greenies.
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