MIDWEST - Located at the site of one of the nation's most notorious oil scandals, the 10,000-acre Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center offers a place for people to put new ideas into practical application in a real-world environment.

The U.S. Department of Energy facility's unique nature is in providing a variety of partners, from inventors to industry, an opportunity to test products and techniques in a 24-hour-a-day working oil field. Shared costs alleviate some of the risk in research and development, while contracts allow confidentiality for companies wishing to explore potentially valuable proprietary technologies.

With oil at over $100 a barrel and demand high, established companies may not be willing to take producing wells of their own off-line to test new technology and tools, center director Clarke Turner said. At the same time, high oil prices can serve as a catalyst for new technology as it becomes more economical.

Each advance furthers the entire energy industry, helps the local and state economies, and lessens dependence on foreign oil, he added. Plus, testers are also investigating ways to extract energy from the earth's resources with greater care for the environment.

New ideas can increase production, net better recovery rates, lower costs to industry and reduce environmental impacts, Turner said.

A storied past

The first well at what is now RMOTC's testing center was drilled 100 years ago, in 1908.

From that point on, the 10,000 or so acres of the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3 about 35 miles from Casper has played host to a variety of uses.

National attention zeroed in on Wyoming as Teapot Dome became synonymous with political scandal in the 1920s. Naval oil reserve lands secretly leased to private companies, spurring a Senate investigation that eventually brought down Sen. Albert B. Fall of New Mexico, who was President Warren G,. Harding's secretary of the interior.

As Fall was found guilty of bribery in 1929, Teapot Dome was closed off. A few exploratory wells were drilled in the mid-century, and in 1977, the Navy handed over the site to the Department of Energy.

With slumping prices in the mid-'80s, the industry clamored for better technology. RMOTC was born in 1993 as a way to use the existing energy resources while allowing industry a place to test new technology.

Now, 1,300 historical well bores and 600 producing wells in nine reservoirs are representative of conditions oil producers encounter across the country. A variety of oil-bearing zones, topography and climate conditions allow testing in the same environments industry works in.

RMOTC's average production is 375 barrels of oil per day and 40,000 barrels of water a day, Public Relations Program Manager Jim Nations said. Gas is produced at an on-site plant.

Most of the work at RMOTC centers on drilling, oil production, enhanced recovery and reducing production costs. However, the NPR No. 3 site is also home to environmental testing and, increasingly, energy alternatives such as geothermal and wind power.

"We see our projects for renewables and energy efficiency trying to bridge a gap between those technologies and the oil industry," Turner said. Attention on renewables helps the oil industry be more environmentally friendly and reduce costs.

"It's good for everybody," he added.

Forging partnerships

Anyone who hammers out a cooperative agreement with RMOTC can test there, from major oil companies to independent producers, service industries, people working with technologies outside the energy industry and even lone inventors developing products or ideas in a garage.

"We really cover the spectrum of what's going on in the energy industry," Nations said.

RMOTC is partnering on new testing facilities operated by a team including representatives from Casper College and the University of Wyoming. Other partnerships, such as with Casper Area Economic Development Alliance, foster impacts closer to home.

"Those partnerships are a win-win for the state, the community, and for our organization, and help us become the premier testing facility in the world," Turner said.

RMOTC may not be far from that. Already, visitors come from every continent except Antarctica to explore the testing center.

"The future is bright," Turner said. "We have the resources, and we have very unique resources. We're the only facility like this in the nation, and, in fact, in the world. Hopefully we'll put Casper on the map with a lot of foreign countries in the research and technology areas."

Core services

At the heart of RMOTC is a core of professional staff with years of experience in energy fields. Employees work with two kinds of clients. The first want to bring lab-based innovation into a working oil field for testing. The second are mom-and-pop type inventors with good ideas but little to no experience in the energy business. They want to apply outside technology to the oil and gas business, and RMOTC staff helps identify how that would work and assists in designing tests.

For example, a company developed an environmental product to clean up oil spills, Turner said. RMOTC helped test the product in a real environment, and now the company is getting a business started. In another instance, bentonite traditionally used to plug water wells was tested on oil wells.

The oil and gas industry can be hesitant to bring new technology in, Turner said. Risks can be significant to high-dollar equipment. RMOTC alleviates some risk to industry by accepting some risk of its own.

Along with staff, RMOTC offers data sets for scientific research, testing and software or training demonstrations. The data can be a gold mine of information from well logs, cores, seismic studies and geographic information system studies.

Jeanette Buelt is a GIS technician for RMOTC. In her colorful office lined with maps showing surface characteristics of the sites and a peek at underground geology, she tinkers with an animated computer program depicting, in 3D, the surface of the testing center site with its varied geology. A click of the mouse takes one on a visual tour of a real well, illuminating what's happening below the earth surface as multiple drill holes spread into different geological formations from a single well hole.

RMOTC added GIS specialists only a few years ago as the technology's implications in the energy industry became clear. Buelt said GIS can help design test layouts, provides visual references to what's happening on the ground, and offers below-ground looks at downhole surveys. Major wall-size maps depict RMOTC's facilities, including pipelines, well locations, roads, utility lines and remote sensing data, all in real-world coordinates.

All that information feeds into RMOTC partnerships, enabling solid field tests and promoting emerging technology, Nations said.