Come to think of it - Boosting oil production with sound

Delta and Delft Integraal/Outlook often write about innovative ideas that offer big promises for the future. But what has happened to such ideas years later? What for instance has happened to the idea of petrochemical engineer, Dr David Smeulders, to extract oil from the ground using acoustic waves?

(Photo: Erik Kounce)

Delta, October 2007
‘When Smeulders visited an oilfield in Siberia a couple of years ago, the Russians showed him that their oil production rose if they allowed a seismic source to vibrate near the oil rig.’  

In the early 1990s, Shell researchers thought they had stumbled upon a new technique for facilitating oil production. Russian researchers had told them that they could retrieve more oil from a well after the Russian military had conducted underground nuclear explosions at a test site hundreds of kilometres away. The vibrations in the ground had to have something to do with this, the Russian researchers surmised.

“So Shell started to experiment with acoustic waves,” says Dr David Smeulders (faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences). “But they didn’t come up with any interesting results. Around the year 2000 the company asked me to look into this.” Is it possible to get the viscous oil flowing if you expose it to sound? Shell asked.

Now, ten years later, Dr Smeulders remains intrigued by the question. He has developed a small glass construction featuring two very thin glass channels. These capillaries, with a diameter of 1-millimetre, contained constrictions, just like pores in the ground. Dr Smeulders demonstrated that it was indeed possible to make little droplets of oil ‘jump’ from one side of a constriction to the other by exposing the droplets to high frequency noise, as the capillary forces were overcome by the acoustic waves.

Dr Smeulders, who in September 2010 became a professor in energy systems at TU Eindhoven, is now trying to get new research financed in order to discover if the same processes would occur in microscopic capillaries: “If you really want to understand what happens in the ground, you must simulate pores that are a hundred times smaller.”
The scientist thinks the technique can work in the petrochemical industry. “Yet the question is how much energy it costs,” he adds. In order for the acoustic waves to penetrate deeply enough into the ground, powerful low frequency waves must be used. Dr Smeulders: “If it takes nuclear explosions to retrieve the oil then it’s not going to happen.”

In 1995, the Russians showed Dr Smeulders that their oil production also rose if they allowed a seismic source to vibrate near the well. But Dr Smeulders believes their oil production rates may have risen simply because they had just cleaned the well.
The technique then is perhaps more promising for another application: cleaning the ground. “In the Netherlands there are 60,000 places where the soil is polluted,” Dr Smeulders notes. “It should be possible to shake lose the contaminants and then wash them out.”