Innovation pipeline: technology transfer in the oil industry

Whether you call it oil money, or the more recent term petro-dollars, the hydrocarbon sector has long been a by-word for wealth. Countries with oil revenues are rich, and oil and gas companies have resources aplenty. It’s easy to assume that, with all that black gold (and whatever the equivalent term is for natural gas) flowing in, they can find the funds to do pretty much whatever they like.

In the dream of oil executives, perhaps; but not in the real world. In fact, finances in the oil and gas sector are squeezed as hard as they are everywhere else. ‘Oil wells can cost as much as half a billion pounds each to drill, and only a quarter of them are successful,’ explained Prof Ann Muggeridge, holder of the Total Chair in Petroleum Engineering at Imperial College London: in this sense, she added, ‘successful’ just means that the well contains oil or gas and says nothing about how much there might be or even whether it would be profitable to extract it. ‘So companies have to be very choosy about what they spend their finite resources on.’