Going with the Flow
Brian Marcotte (PTE ’71) deals in the most precious substance known to man. No, it’s not diamonds but black gold—oil, a vital fuel for both our vehicles and world economies that is fast becoming an endangered commodity. While many engineers focus on their quest to discover alternative energies, Marcotte keeps his eyes fixed squarely on the problem at hand: Where can we find enough oil to supply our global demands until new fuels become widely available?
“As an industry, on a global average, we only produce about 35 percent of the discovered oil, leaving 65 percent unrecoverable with current technology. This is just unacceptable,” says Marcotte, CEO of Titan Oil Recovery, Inc., home to a process known as biological oil stimulation, or the Titan Process®. As oil becomes more difficult to find, business is good for Titan. Titan deals with oil that has already been discovered, but where production is declining. “If we could help turn around that decline and recover additional reserves, it would have potentially a huge impact.”
Marcotte is no stranger to the oil industry. For 34 years, he worked for the Unocal Corporation, starting his relationship with the company while earning his bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering, moving up through the ranks and developing expertise in all aspects of oil and gas exploration, as well as development and production, and finally taking the helm as president of Unocal subsidiaries in the Netherlands, Thailand and Indonesia.
“I was in Indonesia at a fascinating time, just after the fall of President Suharto and the subsequent transition to a democracy,” Marcotte recalls. “They’ve gone through such changes. Now from a purely oil perspective, they are going through yet another transition. Indonesia has been a member of OPEC for 45 years, but its oil production is beginning to decline quite rapidly.
“With declining production, Indonesia is at a point where it’s actually beginning to import oil, and so its status as an OPEC member is very questionable,” he continues. “About 30 percent to 40 percent of the gross national product comes from the oil industry, so as oil production declines, the whole economy sits on a knife’s edge.”
Indonesia’s plight is exactly why Marcotte left retirement to join forces with Titan. “When Titan came along, I was very intrigued, as I have felt for a long time that the next huge breakthrough in the oil industry might well be enhanced oil recovery.”
Titan’s technology started with Australians Noel, Bob and Bill Carroll, and Alan Sheehy, Ph.D. In the late 1980s, the Carrolls helped finance research on a microbial enhanced oil-recovery technology with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia’s largest government-funded research organization.
In the past, Australians have puzzled over how their koalas are able to survive on a diet of eucalyptus leaves, since the leaves are very oily and most animals don’t eat them.
“So they wanted to do a study to find out why is it that a koala is able to eat, digest and get nutrients from eucalyptus,” says Marcotte. “And they found that it was because of the naturally occurring microbes in the gut of the koala that allow the oil to be broken down into a usable form. Well, from that study, the rest is history.”
He admits that the concept of using microbes in oil recovery has been around for decades, but says most of the past processes were designed to do different things, such as cleaning up well-bore paraffin deposits, remediating oil contaminated soils or trying to change the chemistry of the oil. “Most, if not all, of these processes attempted to culture microbes at the surface and pump them into the oil reservoir,” says Marcotte. “These processes utilized oxygen-using microbes, and when the microbes were pumped into the oxygen-free oil reservoir, they could not adapt to the oxygen-free environment, the salinity or, perhaps, the temperature of the reservoir, and died.”
So, how does the Titan’s technology work? Oil exists in the microscopic pore spaces surrounding small grains of sand or limestone in porous rock formations. Physical forces govern the ability of that oil to flow from the reservoir to the producing well. After some amount of production, a significant fraction of the oil originally in place is left “trapped” in the reservoir--unable to be moved or forced out by conventional methods. Titan samples and utilizes naturally occurring microbes already existing in the underground oil reservoirs, and by feeding a field-specific mixture of nutrients, stimulates the microbes to change the flow characteristics of this remaining oil. This allows for more production from the existing field.
It isn’t successful everywhere, such as pools with very heavy tar-like oil, or areas where there is very high salinity in the associated water or very hot geothermal temperatures. But with more than 40,000 oil fields globally, the market is practically unlimited.
“Solving this recovery issue will be an amazing benefit to the oil industry, and we do it with environmentally benign nutrients,” Marcotte emphasizes. “We do not require that oil companies expand their environmental footprint to increase production.”
According to Titan laboratory results, the company’s process can recover up to 24 percent of the oil currently trapped.
“In natural reservoirs, we will not be able to duplicate this performance,” Marcotte says, “but we anticipate being able to recover from 3 percent to 10 percent of the oil originally contained in the reservoir.”
“If all existing fields in the world could recover 10 percent or more of the oil that was already discovered, there would be enough additional oil to meet the current global demand for another 20 years.”
And in a world where demand for oil continues to rise while supplies appear to be declining, Marcotte sees a huge challenge, and a huge opportunity.
“The melding of microbiology and the oil industry is a unique solution to our energy supply needs,” he says. “Whenever science and technology come together in new ways, the results can be extraordinary.”
-- by Teresa Hagen
