Nanotechnology that is, working with matter at the scale of atoms and molecules shows great promise for meeting challenges involved in understanding and utilizing the harder-to-reach oil and gas reservoirs of today. Thats according to scientists at the Advanced Energy Consortium (AEC), a research organization that develops micro- and nano-sensors to transform understanding of subsurface oil and natural gas reservoirs. The University of Texas at Austins Bureau of Economic Geology at the Jackson School of Geosciences manages the AEC. Two AEC scientists, Jay Kipper and Sean Murphy, spoke with EarthSky about how the success of nanomaterials in diverse fields such as medicine and automotives is being applied to petroleum science.

Lets begin with some basics. What is nanotechnology?

Jay Kipper: The prefix nano, from the Latin word nanus for dwarf, means something very small. When were using it in metric terms, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Think about that! Take a strand of hair and put at it between your fingers. The width of that hair is 100,000 nanometers. If you put three atoms of gold side-by-side, thats a nanometer in width. A nanometer is about how much your fingernail grows every second. So a nanometer is really small. It was IBM in the late 1980s that invented the scanning tunneling microscope needed to image individual atoms that really initiated the field of nanoscience. Today, you might say nanotechnology is the application or use of nanoscience to manipulate, control and integrate atoms and molecules to form materials, structures, components, devices and systems at the nanoscale the scale of atoms and molecules.

Why is the oil and gas industry interested in nanotechnology?

Jay Kipper: There are a couple of answers to that question. First, looking at it from the perspective of science, whats really intriguing and fundamental about nanomaterials and nanotechnology is the size of the materials that were studying. The incredibly small size of these nanoscale materials creates opportunities for them to be injected into oil and gas reservoirs.

Microscope slide of the oil-bearing Frio Sandstone from Liberty County, Texas at a depth of 5040 feet. The pink grains are quartz particles, the blue material is a dye which highlights the volume of open pore space through which oil and brines flow freely. Photo courtesy of Bob Loucks, Bureau of Economic Geology, Univ. of Texas.

As readers know, oil and gas is commonly found in rocks that are buried thousands of feet underground. These rocks are constructed like sponges. Even though a rock might look like its solid, it really has many pathways for fluids to flow through freely. The spaces between these sand grains and cemented grains are called pore space and pore throats by geoscientists. Geoscientists have analyzed enough of these oil-bearing sandstones to establish that the pore throat openings commonly range between 100 and 10,000 nanometers in width. Thats large enough for fluids like water, brines, and oil and gas to flow through relatively freely. So if we could put nanoscale tracers or sensors down a hole, they would be small enough to flow through these pores, and we could gain a bunch of valuable information about the rock and the fluid environment where the oil and gas is found.

Whats exciting about nanoscale materials is that, chemically, they behave differently from bulk materials. Theyre sort of magical in many ways. For example, dropping metal powders into water results in all the particles sinking to the bottom or floating to the top, but stable nanoparticles stay in suspension in the fluids, and thats very different from what one might expect. Industries take advantage of these different properties. Nanoparticles in tennis rackets and snow skis enhance their strength. We use nanoparticles of zinc oxide or titanium dioxide in sunscreen to more effectively absorb the ultraviolet light rays and protect the skin. Nanoscale silver is an effective antibacterial agent and is woven into fabrics and clothes to keep them from smelling.

Tell us more about the use of nanotech in the oil and gas industry.

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Jay Kipper and Sean Murphy on nanotechnology in oil and gas production