HydroFlame and Gas-Assisted Gravity Drainage: Two Technologies That Enable Environmental Sustainability in the Oil & Gas Industry

Capturing carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and sequestering it safely from the atmosphere is a twenty-first-century grand challenge posed by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). This chapter presents a novel combustion technology, called HydroFlame (HF) (or Flame-in-Water) technology, that can safely burn the hitherto-flared natural gas while capturing and injecting the flue gases of combustion into oil fields to further enhance oil recovery. Injection of the flue gases into oil fields is implemented through the Gas-Assisted Gravity Drainage (GAGD) process, which significantly boosts both the CO2 sequestration and the oil recovery potential of the scheme. The new combustion and injection system tackles two major environmental challenges facing the oil and gas industry while simultaneously yielding an additional economic benefit of significant improvement in oil recovery from remote and marginal oil fields in the United States and elsewhere. Large quantities of natural gas are currently being flared in oil fields around the globe contributing to methane and CO2 emissions. HydroFlame technology provides a solution to this ever-increasing flaring problem. It enables the gas to burn in such a way that the released thermal energy is captured by generating steam, which is then fed to a turbine to generate shaft power to compress the air used for gas combustion. The flue gas (CO2+N2) is then injected into the oil field for CO2 EOR/Sequestration through the GAGD process. Thus, by enabling EOR and/or sequestration, these twin technologies provide the industry with a sustainable way to considerably reduce (if not eliminate) CO2 emissions from gas flares.