Rice Energy:  Fossil Fuels Cutting-edge Science & Engineering

Gas Hydrates --  Oil & Gas Exploration  --  Brine Chemistry Consortium -- Porous Media Consortirum --  Unconventional Oil Recovery  

The Department of Energy estimates that  85% of U.S. energy is currently derived from fossil fuels --  2/3 of our electricity needs and virtually all of our transportation needs.  Even with aggressive deployment of renewable fuels, the nation's reliance on fossil fuels is expected to increase over the next two decades. 

---

Gas Hydrates
Gas hydrates -- a vast, untapped source of energy -- are a key element in global carbon balance and past global warming events, and represent the number one problem for hydrocarbon transmission in deepwater oil and gas production.  Rice University researchers working in the  Gas Hydrates Initiative believe cross-disciplinary research is needed to enhance understanding of the complex set of scientific issues involved. Much of the existing work has been conducted within individual disciplines such as geology, oceanography, engineering and biology. Modeling that would take knowledge from each of these fields into account is necessary to build a concrete basis for understanding these complicated processes.

Researchers produce data and develop a model of hydrates accumulation and dissociation in porous sediment. This both increases knowledge related to the global carbon cycle and also helps companies locate hydrate accumulations (e.g. "sweet spots"), providing necessary data for the eventual production and transmission of natural gas from hydrates. Also, recognition of conditions responsible for excessive pore fluid pressure helps identify conditions that trigger the sudden release of methane through fracturing and/or fluidization of the sediment. This will be important to the safety of gas production from hydrates as well as better quantifying the conditions under which massive release of methane occurred in the geologic history. 

Oil & Gas Exploration and Production
Rice has internationally recognized expertise in several types of seismic imaging techniques, e.g., forward modeling and traveltime tomography. This research has formed the basis for sedimentological and climate studies in the Maldives, the Gulf of Mexico and Antarctica, and has been used extensively in the research conducted on gas hydrates (see below). Much of the work in seismic imaging is conducted at the university's interdepartmental Center for Computational Geophysics, which combines the expertise of Earth Science, Computational and Applied Mathematics and other departments. (Top)

Brine Chemistry
The overall purpose of the Brine Chemistry Consortium is to perform research, testing, education and technology transfer on brine chemistry, primarily related to oil and gas production. Most brine chemistry problems and approaches in the oil and gas industry are generic and normally treated as essentially non-proprietary in nature. Therefore, it is reasonable to share research resources directed toward solving many of the different types of problems associated with brine production and disposal.

Porous Media
The Processes in Porous Media Consortium focuses on research in enhanced oil recovery, decontamination of hazardous waste sites, and oil and gas exploration and production technologies. Mathematicians and statisticians work with chemical engineers, geologists, and environmental engineers to optimize methods. As an industrial consortium of oil and service companies, the consortium’s projects play an active role for members of the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice. Projects include nuclear magnetic resonance well logging, enhanced oil recovery, surfactant flooding, foam mobility control, asphaltene precipitation and deposition, emulsion separation, gas hydrates, and wettability alteration.

Unconventional Oil Recovery
Roughly 70% of the oil discovered in the world cannot be produced economically by conventional technology. Recovering this heretofore-untapped resource requires a spectrum of technologies. The world energy companies come to Rice to find technological solutions. Members of the Rice faculty have developed significant expertise and reputation in enhanced oil recovery and flow assurance based on research produced in long-standing industrial and DOE funded consortia. These technologies include surfactant-based dispersions that displace otherwise immobile oil and contact regions of reservoirs that would be otherwise unswept, molecularly based technologies to maintain flow by preventing deposits from scale, gas hydrates, and asphaltenes in production operations, and new materials and design methodologies that allow production in more challenging environments. (Top)

 .































 

Faculty & Researchers

Pedro Alvarez
John Anderson
Richard Baraniuk
Enrique Barrera
Andrew Barron
Y. Bayazitoglu
Edward Billups
Liliana Borcea
Walter Chapman
Gerald Dickens
Andre Droxler
Brandon Dugan
Ahmad Durrani
Fathi Ghorbel
Peter Hartley
George Hirasaki
Waylon House
Amy Myers Jaffe
Riki Kobayashi
Hans Ave Lallemant
Adrian Lenardic
Alan Levander
Andreas Luttge
Carrie Masiello
Ken Medlock
Clarence Miller
Kishore Mohanty
Julia Morgan
Satish Nagarajiah
Ronald Nordgren
Matteo Pasquali
Pol Spanos
William Symes
Mason Tomson
Anestis Veletsos
Michael Wong