Industry needs the best technologies to find and produce subtle reserves.

Many of the technologies in the DRC Portfolio have been developed to solve specific exploration problems. Commercialization of these TMIs requires investment beyond DRCs current capabilities.










AquaRobonautSM



For instance, visualization work with NASA's Johnson Space Center over three decades provided exposure to NASA's Robonaut (and other relevant NASA technologies).

Robonaut is a "human form" robot, from the waist up, with television cameras for eyes. Robonaut is remotely controlled by a human operator who has television monitors as eye-glasses and sensors on arms and hands and fingers.

In February of 2009 DRC negotiated, answered an advertisement, and was approved an exclusive contract to use Robonaut technology to support subsea exploration and production.

The idea was to spin this TMI out as a separate company. DRC has yet to be able to follow through on this opportunity because it requires $35 million investment to waterproof Robonaut, insure sufficient strength (torque), and build a manufacturing facility.

Think how small this investment is compared to the cost of the delayed response to the BP Macondo well failure and the impact this disaster is and will continue to have on the entire oil industry. If DRC was funded to deliver The AquaRobonautSM TMI in the spring of 2009, we believe human telepresence would have been available on the sea floor at the time the disaster happened.



Current TMIs include:






  1. TMI-001 Exploring for Baken Prospects by doing geostatistical studies on tops well above the Bakken.
  2. TMI-002 Using a solid understanding of reactivation tectonics to map basement controlled faults, integrating aeromagnetic and onshore EM technologies.
  3. TMI-003 Data Mining commercial databases of production data to identify abandonded fields, which probably are replenishing or have deeper undrilled potential.
  4. TMI-004 Monitoring fracture purmeability in naturally fractured hydrocarbon reservoirs and measuring the impact of earth tides using seismic backscattering techniques.
  5. TMI-005 Regionally mapping geopressure pods as a geopressure based exploration approach.
  6. TMI-006 Using a proprietary normalized energy seismic attribute to provide a scaled probability of oil or gas, automatically contouring anomalies based on the probability, exporting these contours as geobodies in Landmark fault file format, ranking the anomalies by summing the areas of vertically contiguous time-slice contours, automatically sorting the anomalies by depth, and being provided with a color enhanced in-line, cross-line, and time-slice at the centroid of each geobody for rapid screening of 3-D seismic surveys.
  7. TMI-007 Using seismic velocities as an exploration appoach, where gas clouds and fault shadows have turned depth highs into travel-time lows.
  8. TMI-008 New visualization technologies which allow multiple time-slices or multiple seismic lines from any orientation (including horizon slices and geochronostratigraphic reconstruction slices) to be seen at one time showing depth and hidden geomorphology.
  9. TMI-009 Geochronostratighic reconstructions by unwrapping the phase of seismic volumes and comparision with models created using sea level curves and anticipated sediment deposition rates.
  10. TMI-010 Capturing cuttings digitally each time a new pipe section is added, and making these cuttings available in real-time from the drilling rig via secure Internet connections at 10X+ magnification.
  11. TMI-011 Automatically calculating lineaments and rose diagrams from 3-D seismic surveys over fractured reservoirs.
  12. TMI-012 Real-time tracking of oil, gas, and water as reservoirs are being optimally drained to allow 4-D computer-aided LEAN management.
  13. TMI-013 Using immersive treadmills and new user interfaces to improve immersive visualization.
  14. TMI-014 Capturing and indexing experience, where the demonstration project is to capture the outcrop, log, and seismic analog atlas Ward Abbott has spent a career developing.
  15. TMI-015 Building data repositories in third world countries to allow capture, cataloging, and integration of data in order to improve exploration.
  16. TMI-016 Using AquaRobonautSM to mine gas hydrates, specifically thermogenic crystal gas hydrates associated with deep sea fault leakage.
  17. TMI-017 Using AquaRobonautSM to manage subsurface facilities.
  18. TMI-018 Building solar towers up the side of mountains to create sustainable energy for 200,000 homes.
  19. TMI-019 Using a raster based GIS system called The Infinite GridSM to index spatial information as xml calls.
  20. TMI-020 Using a process model of an ideal oil and gas company called The Knowledge BackboneSM to index processes as xml calls.
  21. TMI-021 Using a kinetic pump to economically dewater wells and pump heavy oil.