Industry partnerships and grants equaling $1 million from the U.S. Department of Energy assist Kishore K. Mohanty, professor of chemical engineering and director of the Institute for Improved Oil Recovery, in cracking open the secrets of porous, oil-containing rocks.

Kishore K. Mohanty’s goal is to get the oil out of the ground more efficiently for improved oil recovery.

“We study the structure of the sandstones and carbonates,” said Mohanty. “Oil is not in a big lake or a pool underground—it is inside these pores which are 1/10 to 1/100 millimeter wide. This is why we do things on a very small scale.”

Mohanty and his team of graduate students are studying how these structures affect the flow of oil, water and gases and how the process of extracting these elements out of the medium can be improved.

Through the Institute for Improved Oil Recovery, industry partners such as BP, Chevron, Exxon, PTS and Schlumberger Geoquest help provide funds and materials needed to conduct the research. These organizations also provide valuable feedback during a yearly review regarding the implementation of this research out in the field, helping to keep the programs focused on industry related issues.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s funding allowed for research on three individual projects. A half million dollars is allocated to a research project called “The Effect of Capillary and Bond Numbers on Relative Permeability.” Mohanty’s roll in this project is to better understand the effect of flooding conditions on drainage relative permeabilities.

The second DOE project, “Fluid Rock Characterization and Interactions in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Well Logging” intends to create parameters and interpretation methods for reservoirs that operate outside normal parameters. The third project, “Exploitation and Optimization of Reservoir Performance in Hunton Formation, OK” studies the mechanism under which oil is produced from the Hunton Formation and to propose techniques to optimize performance of these reservoirs using various technologies. These projects received funding of a quarter million dollar each.

In addition to the DOE work, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is sponsoring “Computation of Transport Properties from Petrograhic Images,” one of the main projects currently housed in Mohanty’s labs. The goal of the project is to develop a methodology and software package to compute transport properties of a formation from its petrographic images. Using a vertical CT Scanner, one of three in North America, the researchers construct three-dimensional reservoir simulation models based on thin-sections and core samples.

“We do it because research is fun,” proclaimed Mohanty. “We help make the process more efficient and more effective. Oil companies have to improve their ways to do it better. Especially now since in the past 15 years oil company research has shrunk quite a bit. They rely on universities and service companies to provide a lot of the research functions. They want to be more flexible and be prepared for very low oil prices and the only way they can do it is to contract out some of the research.”

Energy research in the new millennium is a growth industry. Dr. Mohanty is one of many professors and researchers at the UH Cullen College of Engineering involved in energy research programs.