Creating New Deep Science Technology for Oil and Gas

The Oil & Gas Technology Centre has launched TechX Ventures – a partnership with Deep Science Ventures (DSV) that combines deep science with engineering to create start-up companies with technologies that position the oil and gas industry for a sustainable future in a low carbon economy.

As part of the TechX Ventures program, DSV has recruited three teams of scientists and engineering experts from across the world to tackle key challenges. The nine-month program will create a handful of start-up companies with new intellectual property.

A workshop held with industry, academia and the scientific community, identified areas where new thinking and technology could open up significant opportunities. Three challenge themes were developed, each of which will be worked on by a TechX Ventures team:

Carbon negative operations

Effective, large scale, affordable carbon capture and storage solutions are essential to meet global emissions targets. TechX Ventures seeks to create new technologies that will allow the capture of carbon at source, safe storage and conversion to other useful products such as graphene and hydrogen.

Automated oil and gas

Oil and gas is playing catch-up with other industries, such as automotive and aerospace, when it comes to adopting robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. TechX Ventures aims to apply recent advances in these areas to North Sea operations to improve safety, enhance production efficiency and automate the decommissioning process.

Energy movement

Extracting, transporting and using oil and gas presents many challenges. TechX Ventures wants to revolutionize the movement of energy from well to customer by creating technologies which convert the reserves to electrical energy at source, store and transport electrical energy and convert currently wasteful processes e.g. gas flaring to electrical energy.

DSV’s founders have spent nearly a decade helping to launch and grow over 50 science driven companies. An incredible 75% of these companies continue to grow and the team has had five exits, including Hark (Google) and Surreal Vision (Facebook).

The teams will be based at DSV in London and have access to office space, access to specialized labs and facilities, and sector-specific expertise.

The start-ups created through the TechX Ventures program will enter the next cohort of the TechX Pioneer accelerator program, which is scheduled to start in May 2019 and offers up to £100,000 equity free, no payback funding.