Public Oil and Natural Gas Field Research Helps to Accelerate Technological Advances

Abstract The Department of Energy (DOE), over its nearly 50-year history, has managed its oil and natural gas research and development (R&D) mission through scientific research carried out in government-run or contractor-run test sites, through research grants to small businesses, and through extramural research projects contracted with industry and university partners or other research institutions. At times, DOE has sought to expand its R&D footprint by venturing into the field to do experiments and gather data. During the past ten years, DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has undertaken a number of field research initiatives, referred to as "field test sites," that have achieved varying successes. The rationale behind these field test sites is based on the idea that DOE should partner with industry to gain access to historic, current, and emerging producing oil and natural gas fields to accomplish three objectives: (1) publicly test new tools and methods developed by NETL and industry, (2) gather comprehensive data sets and make them accessible for analysis by broad teams of researchers, and (3) attack higher-risk scientific research problems that private industry consortia have not prioritized for funding. In doing so, the primary goal has been to accelerate the development, application and adoption of new technologies and approaches to maximize domestic oil and natural gas recovery and, more recently, reduce environmental impacts. This approach is not new. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, DOE (and its precursor organization) funded the Western Gas Sands and Eastern Gas Shales R&D programs (WGSP and EGSP). The WGSP included the drilling and logging of wells at a multi-well field test site in the Piceance Basin, data from which were used to build comprehensive models of tight gas sand geology and production capacity. Similarly, the EGSP program drilled, logged, and tested a number of wells across multiple Eastern basins, helping to design and test well logging and completion techniques suited for tight gas shales and characterizing the gas content and productive capacity of formations that were (at that time) not perceived as economically productive. The public findings of these two scientific inquiries helped to accelerate a revolution in "unconventional" natural gas production that remains the driving force behind the U.S. global leadership in natural gas production today. In this paper, we point out the advantages of public upstream oil and natural gas field research, highlighting the success of four of the past decade's field test site projects: the Marcellus Shale Energy and Environment Lab (MSEEL) in West Virginia, the Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site 1 (HFTS1) and Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site 2 (HFTS2) in West Texas, and the North Slope Polymer Flood Test Site in Alaska. In addition, we provide detail on 9 other field projects that are currently underway.