Left to right: Chevron's Ben Bloys, Brian Llewellyn and Manny Gonzalez

A LANL-Chevron Partnership

February / March 06 By: Renee Silveira Volume 4 Number 1

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In November 2004, Chevron Corporation announced plans to establish an alliance with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop a range of technologies for the oil and gas industry. Despite their apparently divergent fields, it didn't take long for Chevron and Los Alamos to start coming up with exciting adaptations of science already in practice beyond the oil patch. The first development produced within just one year by the partnership is proof of the chemistry of the alliance. Fittingly, it involves the chemistry of paint, much like the acrylic variety used in household projects.

Chevron's Manny Gonzalez, the senior engineering advisor who manages the alliance, explained to Los Alamos how deepwater drilling fluids trapped behind casing—€”pipe cemented in place within the borehole—€”expand because of downhole temperature and cause catastrophic pressures that can crush the casing. Contending with the problem of "trapped annular pressure" typically costs some $1.5 million per well.

Los Alamos scientists came back with several options, and one stood out as a surprisingly simple solution: using a component of paint as an ingredient in the drilling mud. The material shrinks when temperature rises.

Partnership is a critical part of Chevron's strategy in technology research and development, and this alliance in developing energy industry solutions derived from Department of Energy and Department of Defense technologies demonstrates what is possible through such work, says Don Paul, Chevron's chief technology officer.

Chevron's vision is to be the global energy company most admired for its people, partnership and performance. The company's relationship with DOE includes several grants and a leadership role as the only energy company to lead a demonstration project to assess hydrogen infrastructure and fuel cell technology in "real-life" scenarios. This past February, the company opened its first demonstration hydrogen station in Chino, Calif., at the Hyundai-Kia America Technical Center.

"While drilling and upstream technologies are the early —€˜benefactors' of the alliance, new and adapted technologies will also aim for breakthroughs in the midstream and downstream [manufacturing] parts of Chevron's business. In addition to the programmatic objectives, we were also able to come up with an arrangement with Los Alamos that met both our needs and was very beneficial for the lab in terms of the intellectual property rights and other factors," says Kevin Lacy, who participated in the negotiations back in 2004. Lacy is the head of Chevron's Drilling and Completions organization.

"Got a Solution?"
Gonzalez refers to Los Alamos as a "treasure trove of exciting technology," much already developed for military and space science. "The beauty of working with Los Alamos is that they are accustomed to developing solutions and technologies quickly and getting them out to the field, namely for national defense and security applications. This pace perfectly suits our needs in oil and gas industry where the challenges in reaching oil are greater than ever," he says.
According to Gonzalez, "We use two approaches. We ask Los Alamos to describe technologies they have developed that may be of interest to us, and we also describe our actual challenges and ask, 'Got a solution?'"

The indicators are that solutions may come from some unlikely sources. A scientist working on laser rods, the heart of solid-state lasers, was the mastermind behind the idea of using the paint component to reduce the annular pressure in the oil and gas wells. Lucite, a material often used in plastic laser rods and other optical components, is made from the same monomer used to make acrylic paint. Shrinkage is a common problem with these monomers, and it occurred to the Los Alamos scientist that this could be a plus in a drilling situation.

The paint monomer solution was first brainstormed in March 2005, and a well test had been completed by November 2005. Both ICI (Glidden) and Lucite paint companies participated in the project. The microscopic ball-shaped monomers polymerize into long spaghetti-like strands when exposed to heat, and when that happens, they take up less room, shrinking as much as 19 percent. When these monomers are present in the drilling fluid, they have the same shrinking effect when that liquid gets trapped behind the casing of a deepwater well and heats up. Gonzalez says his team is searching for an intermediate well test situation—€”onshore or offshore in shallow water—€”in which to assess the monomers one more time before ultimate deployment in the deepwater. A patent has been filed.

Bouncing Off Ideas and Downhole Information
"We're always chasing ways of monitoring what's going on in the well," says Chevron's Ben Bloys, who is on the alliance team. "Methods to communicate down the well have been generally unreliable because they involve wires and power sources. The conditions are corrosive because of the salt water and the carbon dioxide dissolved in the water, and the pressure and temperature are tough on the power supplies," he says, adding, "Fiber optics haven't been very successful either." The Chevron team listened to Los Alamos describe the technology used by the military to transmit a signal from a far-away source in the field without using any power. It's known as Radio Frequency Telemetry and Sensor Technology.
"Essentially, the technology involves bouncing a signal off equipment in the field, which then modifies its reflectivity and thereby encodes data onto the reflected signal. We asked, —€˜Can you do this in a well?' Los Alamos said they didn't know but they'd try to find a way, and they did.

"Developing something from scratch in R&D takes a lot longer than adapting a technology already being used successfully. That's exactly the case of this technology, which we call INFICOMM," says Bloys.

Field trials, conducted in the Eunice Field in New Mexico, have demonstrated considerable success in transmitting a high volume of data via the wireless communication system over 4,000 feet, using the equivalent of a 1/1000th of the power of a 30-watt light bulb to power the above-ground transmitter. The system would also allow production data to be sent from remote wells to a platform or flow station without the need for batteries or solar panels.

Listening Closely
Swept Frequency Acoustic Interferometry (SFAI) is another technology that Los Alamos is working with Chevron to adapt for use in the oil and gas field. Chevron's Brian Llewellyn, another member of the alliance team, says SFAI would be a breakthrough because it would allow continuous well-performance measurements and determination of fluid properties and constituents—€”the percentages of oil, water and gas, for instance—€”without ever having to take physical samples or intrude on the flow stream.

The work to date has concentrated on sand monitoring, drilling mud properties, flow metering, and tubing and pipeline inspections. The next phase of work will investigate breaking up emulsions in the production stream, assessing the volume of inhibition chemicals in a flow stream and measuring the composition of the flow stream.

Renee Silveira is with the public information department at Chevron Corp.