North Sea partnership to pursue energy-efficient developments

Offshore staff

ABERDEEN, UK – The Oil & Gas Technology Centre has initiated TechX Ventures, a partnership with Deep Science Ventures (DSV).

This will combine ‘deep science’ with engineering to create start-up technologies that can help the oil and gas industry achieve a sustainable future in a low carbon economy.

DSV has recruited three teams of scientists and engineering experts from various parts of the world to address pressing issues. Following the nine-month program, new start-up companies should emerge.

During a workshop with representatives from the industry and academia and scientists, the Centre identified areas where it felt new thinking and technology could bring significant opportunities.

Three challenge themes were developed – one of the TechX Ventures team will work on each of these:

• Carbon negative operations: Effective, large-scale, affordable carbon capture and storage solutions are needed to meet global emissions targets. The partnership will aspire to create new technologies that allow the capture of carbon at source, with safe storage and conversion to other products such as graphene and hydrogen.
• Automated oil and gas: Oil and gas remains behind other industries, such as automotive and aerospace, in adopting robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. The partnership will look to apply recent advances in these areas to North Sea operations to improve safety and production efficiency and automate the decommissioning process.
• Energy movement: TechX Ventures wants to transform the current process of moving energy from well to customer by creating technologies that convert the reserves to electrical energy at source; store and transport electrical energy; and convert presently wasteful processes (such as gas flaring) to electrical energy.

Over the past decade DSV’s founders have helped launch and develop more than 50 science-driven companies, 75% of which continue to grow.

For this program the teams will be based at DSV in London, with access to specialized laboratories and facilities and sector-specific expertise.

Start-ups created through TechX Ventures will enter the next phase of the TechX Pioneer accelerator program, due to start next May and offering up to £100,000 ($131,000) equity-free, no-payback funding.

07/30/2018