SBIR Phase I: Integrated Technologies for Addressing Environmental Challenges in the Energy Industries

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to capture carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and sequester it safely from the atmosphere. This project uniquely combines two new technologies to eliminate the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from flaring of huge volumes of natural gas in remote oil fields; the technologies burn it in a novel combustion system and uses the generated heat to treat the oil-field produced water.

The cooled flue gases of combustion are then injected via a novel process into oilfields for enhancing oil recovery. This makes the entire process economically feasible and environmentally beneficial.

The proposed combustion system involves a novel concept of “Fire-in-Water” to carry out combustion of a fuel directly within a flowing stream of water, thereby enhancing the heat transfer coefficients by several orders of magnitude compared to conventional indirect heat transfer systems involving metallic heat transfer surfaces (such as shell-and-tube heat exchangers) separating the heated and heating media. This project proposes this combustion system to burn natural gas currently wasted through flares in remote oil fields, resolving a major environmental problem facing the industry.

The second innovation utilizes the heat generated by combustion of flare-gas in the novel burner to treat oil-field produced water, another long-standing environmental concern. The third innovation uses the flue gas generated by combustion (of flare-gas) for injection into oil fields to produce trapped oil. The project will demonstrate: (1) Successful adoption (through application of combustion, heat transfer and two-phase flow principles) of the combustor design from steam generator to flue gas generator; (2) The combustor’s ability to burn flare-gas of varying hydrocarbon contents and compositions; (3) The ability to treat oil-field produced water; (4) Field-scale viability; and (5) Mathematical models and computer simulations for implementation and process scale-up.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.