College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Rumblings down below

Igor Beresnev creates new acoustic tool for oil production, underground gas tanks.
The oil and gas industry typically abandons wells with high water-to-oil ratios because the associated operating costs are just too high.

The economics of cleaning up environmental hazards created by abandoned underground gas tanks is just as costly.

Enter Igor Beresnev, assistant professor of geological and atmospheric sciences, and ETREMA Products, Inc., an Ames-based company operating at the University Research Park.

The two have developed an acoustic tool (Powerwave¨) that can conceivably help both the oil industry enhance oil production and governments remove contaminated organic products from groundwater.

The new tool is designed to emit pressure waves into a rock formation or reservoir in a way that is similar to the seismic waves that occur during an earthquake. This allows producers of high-water cut wells to increase production from their fields and may even allow previously unprofitable fields to be reopened for profitable production.
Beresnev's research showed that over the past 40 years, wave excitation considerably increased the mobility of fluids.

Beresnev and ETREMA predict that the new tool can increase recoverable reserves by as much as 15 percent. Demand for the product has increased in recent months with the increased gasoline and oil prices.

"There was quite a bit of oil left in those wells, but it wasn't economically feasible for companies to drill for it," Beresnev said. "Now prices are so high companies are looking at all kinds of technology to increase production including this tool."

The usefulness of the acoustic stimulation tool also extends to environmental applications. Again by emitting pressure waves into a rock formation, the underground contaminates are moved to a borehole for a pump-and-treat application. Estimates suggest that costs for clean up of such abandoned underground tank sites will be reduced by 50 percent.

That's a significant figure considering the estimated cost of cleaning up the sites in Iowa is $205 million with a nationwide cost of almost $21 billion.

"It's a lot cheaper to pump out the contaminates using this method than excavating the old sites which is the current method typically used," Beresnev said.

"We have applied the same technology to two very different problems by using the same geophysics. The sound mobilizes the fluid and makes it flow and form a pool."

Beresnev actually began researching this problem back in the '80s in his native Russia. He later moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Carleton University in Canada before coming to Iowa State in the fall of 1998.

By that time ETREMA had already used his research to begin development of the acoustic tool. Ironically though, neither the company nor Beresnev knew that both were based in Ames. That quickly changed.

"In less than two weeks after I started working at Iowa State, we met and worked out a collaboration agreement," Beresnev said. "It was just a lucky coincidence that we were both in Ames."