Three-dollar gas is a drag. Getting from A to B in our city—a city built around the concept of driving—is eating a big chunk of our household budgets.

So what’s there to do, other than wince as the pump approaches the $50 mark for a tank of gas? Well, Professor Kishore Mohanty drives to work just like the rest of us, but his work in a UH chemical engineering lab puts him in a better position to do something about it.

And that’s what he’s done. Mohanty devised a technique that may lessen the financial toll of future fill-ups by doing something that seems surprisingly simple—he’s finding ways to collect oil that others have left behind.

There’s (still) oil in them thar hills

Let’s talk Texas oil. The oil bust in the 1980s dried up all the wells in the state, right? Not really. Only the oil that was cheap and easy to reach is gone. Most of the state’s oil reservoirs still have about half, and sometimes 95 percent of their oil.

“In Texas alone, an estimated 120 billion barrels of oil are stranded,” Mohanty says. “We think that our technology can recover about 15 billion barrels of that oil—this number would be far greater in the Middle East, which has many of the same type of reservoirs, but on a much larger scale.”

Mohanty’s 15 billion barrels aren’t chicken feed—that’s enough to run the entire country for more than three years.

More oil = lower prices

The world consumes 80 million barrels of oil per day; America consumes 13 million barrels of that daily tab. The result: the world’s demand for oil is nearly equal to the current supply, which breeds higher prices.

But high prices aren’t necessarily permanent—even minor increases in production can greatly reduce the price of oil, says Craig Pirrong, director of energy markets at the UH Global Energy Management Institute and professor of finance.

“Every little bit helps,” he says. “For every 1 percent increase in world production, the price of oil can be reduced by 5 to 10 percent.”

Let’s assume that Mohanty’s technology was readied for every reservoir in Texas. If work were to progress over the next twenty years, more than 2 million barrels of Texas oil could be recovered every day … more than enough to have a profound impact on the global oil market.

An underground Laundromat

Mohanty’s technology works like a clothing detergent for oil-soaked rock. He uses low concentrations of chemicals called surfactants, which have the same basic properties as soap. The surfactant penetrates the rock matrix deep underground, essentially washing oil off the rock so that it can be collected.

And it’s cheap—he estimates that the chemical cost of his process is about 50 cents to $1 per barrel to recover oil from an essentially dead well. Current surfactant processes cost about $10 per barrel.

The next step in Mohanty’s research is translating his successful lab tests to the field, and he’s looking for a corporate partner. He hopes the search will be a short one.

Pirrong says that the oil industry depends on emerging technologies like Mohanty’s to keep prices stable.

“The easy oil has been tapped out,” he says. “As much as we don’t like $70 barrels of oil, prices would be substantially higher without new technologies like this.”

For more on UH energy research, visit www.uh.edu/energy.