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Sciences

MIRROR

Microgravity Industry-Related Research for Oil Recovery

Canada's Exploration in Space for Enhanced Oil Recovery on Earth

The Canadian Space Agency and a consortium of partners from government and industry launched an exciting set of experiments in space in search of new ways to extract oil from the ground and clean up accidental spills in the environment.

The three Canadian-designed Microgravity Industry-Related Research for Oil Recovery experiments, known collectively as the MIRROR project, were conducted aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery during the STS-91 flight in June 1998. The two first experiments as much as the Canadian instrumentation were developed and intergrated by C-CORE, a Canadian enterprise from Newfoundland. The third experiment was developed by the Microgravity Research Center (MRC) from Belgium. All the experiments were fully automated and self-contained. 

The Canadian Space Agency's Microgravity Sciences Program co-sponsored the mission. Other partners included the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, ESA, and a number of petroleum companies: Petro-Canada, Husky Oil, Mobil, Chevron, Elf Aquitaine and Murphy.

The purpose of this project was to use the microgravity environment of space to develop new technologies that ultimately could have an impact on the Canadian oil industry, environmental clean-up, and the world's future oil reserves. For example, researchers from the Petroleum Recovery Institute expected that the MIRROR space experiments would provide insight into the physical properties of the foams used for extracting oil, which could help scientists and engineers develop more efficient and less costly extraction processes.

In operating oil fields, conventional means of extraction still leave large amounts of oil in the ground. Initially, oil is forced to the surface by its own natural pressure. When that pressure subsides, more oil is artificially forced out of the ground by pumping water or gas into the reserve. But that still leaves about two-thirds of the oil trapped in tiny pores of rock beneath the Earth's surface. This is a huge amount: it is estimated, for instance, that a one per cent increase in this recovery rate would be the equivalent of supplying the entire world-wide oil demand for three years!

Researchers have been experimenting for many years with a wide variety of possible means to pull or push remaining oil out of sub-surface rock pores. One such method involves injecting foam into the oil reserve.

The date from the MIRROR experiments will assist in the development of numerical models and chemical products intended to improve oil recovery from reservoirs.

Get more information about material sciences research supported by the Microgravity Science Program.