RMOTC: test bed for new energy initiatives

Rockies facility provides opportunities to try out cutting-edge technologies

 

BY ALAN BAILEY FOR GREENING OF OIL

Teapot Dome, an oil field in the eastern Rocky Mountains near Casper, Wyoming, gained infamy in the 1920s because of a scandal involving the secret leasing of U.S. Navy land to private oil interests. But nowadays the field has achieved a more reputable status as a government-sponsored testing ground for technologies that can reduce the environmental impacts of energy production.

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The testing facility, known as the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center, or RMOTC for short, provides inventors, entrepreneurs, service companies and major oil companies with a 10,000-acre “sandbox,” complete with operating oil wells, drilling rigs and other equipment, for trying out anything from new techniques for treating oilfield water to experimental power generation systems.

And, with an abundance of wind, sunshine and underground geothermal resources, the center is finding an increasing role for the testing of various renewable energy technologies, RMOTC Director Clarke Turner, told Greening of Oil March 19.

“We’re much broader than just oil fields,” Turner said.

Provides a neutral venue for testing

As a part of the U.S. Department of Energy, RMOTC receives government funding and is thus able to provide a neutral venue, fully staffed and equipped, that can enable a company to carry out a test program quickly and without some of the commercial risks associated with testing in the private arena.

For example, the RMOTC facility has already been established as a test site under the National Environmental Policy Act, thus eliminating the need for the perhaps six months to two years of environmental impacts investigations that would typically be needed prior to initiating a test program that requires federal permitting, Turner explained.

In fact, major oil companies sometimes find it convenient to use the RMOTC facility to test new oilfield techniques, fully funding the testing and retaining the rights to the technology being evaluated, Turner said.

But smaller organizations typically partner with RMOTC to obtain expert assistance from RMOTC personnel in designing and conducting tests. However, under federal statutes a customer must pony up at least 50 percent of the total cost of a project, Turner said.

Center provides oil industry expertise

With an operating oil field at Teapot Dome, RMOTC personnel can provide oil industry expertise to a company that lacks any oil industry experience but perhaps has a widget with potential industry application.

“(In that type of situation) they don’t understand the oil industry. They don’t know even who to talk to in the oil industry and they don’t know how to make that practical,” Turner said. “… Someone like that, they’ll come to us and we’ll design the whole test … and also show them where this might be applicable.”

On the other hand, an oilfield service company wanting to test some new technique will typically have its own engineers and will know how to conduct its tests. In that case, RMOTC will provide the personnel for conducting the tests and operating on-site equipment.

Whoever is using the facility, RMOTC can help put its customers in touch with appropriate partners such as university researchers with expertise in a particular type of technology.

The center also offers a fully-operational drilling rig for drilling wells and two or three smaller rigs for oil well maintenance. RMOTC has support equipment on-site, thus enabling personnel to respond within minutes to any unanticipated situations that might arise during testing. With 14 federal employees and 85 to 95 contractors employed full time, the facility can operate and monitor tests continuously, over multiple days if necessary.

“We’re essentially a self-contained, operating oil field,” said Jim Nations, RMOTC public relations program manager. “… We’re fully staffed and fully equipped to do most everything.”

Teapot Dome field went into production in late 1970s

The evolution of the Teapot Dome oil field into RMOTC dates back to 1977, when the federal government transferred jurisdiction of the field, designated as Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3 and wholly government owned, from the U.S. Navy to the Department of Energy, or DOE. The field had remained shut-in following the 1920s land-lease scandal, but the Middle East oil embargo of the 1970s motivated the government to put the field into production, to boost U.S. oil supplies.

Oil production started in 1979, peaked in the 1980s and went into a long, slow decline thereafter, Turner said.

By the 1990s Teapot Dome had become a “stripper field,” producing modest but continuing volumes of crude oil. And nowadays the field produces about 200 barrels of oil per day, Turner said.

“We’re the only government-owned oil field that’s left operating in the United States,” he said.

But in the 1990s, as field production declined, DOE proposed using the field as a test and demonstration center, accessible to industry, government organizations and academia, Turner said. The concept was to support domestic oil producers with applied research having immediate paybacks, as distinct from the type of pure research that might take 15 to 20 years to come to fruition, Turner explained.

RMOTC was established in 1993, with the State of Wyoming providing some funding for the center in 1994, and DOE starting its funding in 1995.

Early DOE projects focused on energy efficiency, renewables

Early DOE funded research particularly focused on the department’s energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, with projects involving technologies such as energy efficient pumps, solar power and wind energy, Turner said.

“From there, every year projects have gotten larger and larger, and now with renewables being so important … we’re getting larger renewable projects,” he said.

And, with the aging Teapot Dome oil field now delivering large quantities of warm water along with its remaining crude oil, the testing of technologies that can extract energy from the warmth of that water has become a strong focus at RMOTC, Nations said. Success with this technology could open the gate to extracting energy from produced water in many other oil fields, thus creating a whole new means of power generation from energy that would otherwise be vented to the atmosphere.

Ormat Technologies, a company specializing in geothermal power, is partnering with RMOTC in this particular research avenue and has been trying out a system called an organic Rankine cycle to generate electricity. This type of system uses the warm oilfield water to boil a volatile, low-boiling-point fluid, and hence drive a turbine-powered electrical generator.

Using oilfield water presents some new challenges

Organic Rankine cycle technology has already established a successful track record of use in geothermal power systems, where the warm water that drives a system comes from naturally occurring hot springs. However, the use of the technology for extracting energy from oilfield water is new and faces some unique challenges, in particular the fluctuating nature of the water supply and water temperatures in an oilfield situation.

One lesson gleaned from the tests at RMOTC, for example, has been the need for a valve system, to flatten out the effects of the water supply fluctuations and thus prevent the generator turbine from spinning out of control, Turner said.

And wide ranges in air temperatures between winter and summer at the Teapot Dome site have pushed the limits on the equipment’s temperature operating range.

“If it will work in Wyoming there’s a pretty good chance it’ll work in most places in the world,” Nations said.

Testing equipment to reduce field fuel usage

Some tests in progress at RMOTC are focusing on reducing the fuel usage for oilfield operations. For example, one test involves the use of natural gas produced from the Teapot Dome field to power a device called a WhisperGen Stirling cycle generator—an electric generator using a high-efficiency engine that burns fuel externally rather than within the engine—to power oilfield pumps.

“It’s the kind of thing that produces in-situ power and could be located really anywhere that you have that resource—the field gas—to produce electricity for a small pump,” Nations said.

There is also a test in progress of a solar powered oil-well pump, with the solar power unit mounted on a snowmobile trailer for transportation to a well site. The solar power system avoids the need for an external power supply.

“Once the well has been drilled, we’re not putting up additional power lines and power poles, or road impacts. … The trailer’s hauled out there and set up and off it goes,” Nations said.

In another power generation initiative, RMOTC has partnered with Casper College, the local community college, and with a local power utility to install a 6-kilowatt wind turbine to provide power for the overall oilfield power grid.

Looking to investigate an enhanced geothermal system

And RMOTC continues to move forward, seeking new projects.

In particular, the center is looking to take a further step in geothermal technology by leveraging the abnormally high temperatures of the subsurface rocks at Teapot Dome. The concept here is to drill into dry, warm granite known to exist 7,000 to 8,000 feet below the surface and then fracture that granite. Then, it ought to be possible to heat water by pumping it through the granite, with warm water returning to the surface and powering an organic Rankine cycle power generation system.

That could point the way to a new generation of geothermal applications, in locations distant from strong seismic activity but where modestly elevated temperatures underground could provide new sources of renewable energy.

Link of interest

Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center, or RMOTC

Contact Alan Bailey at abailey@petroleumnews.com