The Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee) has established a state-of-the-art laboratory — the Rock and Fluid Multiphysics Laboratory. The lab will host cutting-edge technology solutions and it was inaugurated today, October 3, by Padma Bhushan Dr Vijay Kumar Saraswat, Honorable Member, NITI Aayog, in the presence of Professor Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, Professor Manoranjan Parida, Deputy Director, IIT Roorkee, and Professor Akshay Dwivedi, Dean SRIC, IIT Roorkee, as reported by ANI. Professor Manika Prasad, Colorado School of Mines, USA, along with Professor Anand Joshi, Head Earth Sciences, and other respected faculty colleagues of IIT Roorkee and students also graced the inaugural ceremony.
The lab has the tools and technologies in the domain of Applied Geoscience and Petroleum Engineering that can facilitate multiphysics and multiscale experiments and create feasibility models for increasing the success rates of the exploration and development targets of energy companies in their efforts to successfully exploit conventional and unconventional energy resources, stated the ANI report. The laboratory has a low-frequency system that provides dynamic estimates of the seismic rock property response in the range of 0.1 Hz to 3000 Hz, under in situ conditions. This simulates the in situ reservoir under hydrostatic assumptions. The Pseudo Triaxial Setup provides the static (0 Hz) estimates of the elastic and the associated geo-mechanical attributes in the formations of mineral deposits under more realistic subsurface conditions.
The laboratory is also capable of making an observation in the resistivity domains using economic and non-destructive techniques such as spectral induced polarization (SIP) measurements and the cation exchange capacity (CEC) measurements.
This lab can handle characterisation challenges of the oil and gas reservoir in routine and complex formations. The lab can also carry out carbon utilisation and storage feasibility studies for formations such as shales, organic-rich resources, carbonates and so on. This lab can prove to be of significant value addition in helping the geoscientist and petroleum engineers in having an insight into the physical processes happening inside Earth and make well-constrained decisions with minimum possible uncertainty stated the report.
The ANI report stated that Professor Ravi Sharma, In-charge, Rock and Fluid Multiphysics Laboratory, IIT Roorkee, highlighted, "In the laboratory, we simultaneously experiment with rock physics modelling to investigate the multiphysical properties of rocks, fluids and their interactions at benchtop and in-situ condition. It is very challenging to invert for the subsurface properties but the critical feasibility models from this laboratory can help reduce the uncertainty to understand the potential of oil & gas, hydrates, and geothermal resources."
Dr Vijay Kumar Saraswat, Member, NITI Aayog, told ANI, "State-of-the-art laboratories like these fit very well into the dynamics of the challenges associated with exploration and development of energy resources hosted in the complex subsurface formation. This laboratory would also be a significant boost to the efforts of carbon sequestration and a good understanding of the associated implications with the help of feasibility models created in the lab. My best wishes to Prof. Sharma and hope to see some field applicable solutions coming out from the laboratory in near future."
Professor Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, said, "The Rock and Fluid Multiphysics Laboratory at IIT Roorkee is ideally located near the Himalayan Mountain ranges and very close to the headquarters of ONGC. This lab will significantly contribute to the petroleum engineering profession, groundwater exploration and resource characterisation. This will help towards a sustainable approach in energy exploration,” as reported by ANI.
