As with everything else, nanotechnology has found a very vital place in the oil industry. Be it special types of coating to protect against everything from corrosion to odors or heavy-duty filtration systems to provide more bang for your buck (quite literally), the oil industry is vastly assisted with the aid of nanotechnology. This article will attempt to provide a better understanding of both the oil industry in general and how nanotechnology will benefit it. Hopefully by reading this article, you will be able to grasp the importance of nanotechnology, both in the oil industry and in general application. Let us begin.
Nanocoatings
The idea of nanocoatings isn’t really that hard to figure out once you read its name, but here’s a more in-depth description: Nanocoatings are nanosized particles comprised of some sort of mineral or chemical that’s usually painted onto a surface, generally being an appliance of some sort, to aid the device in a wide assortment of functions. The following is a list of several types of nanocoatings and what those coatings can do to make a device or object stronger or more dependable.
Thermal Coatings
Thermal nanocoatings provide the machinery of the oil industry with the protection it needs from geothermal conditions that could literally melt the metal of the drills and other equipment that is necessary to the extraction of oil from the Earth. Often times, these machines have to work for long periods of time far below the Earth’s surface in order to get to the oil. Because of this, thermal nanocoatings help aid the equipment with the defenses required to withstand both the heat and pressures found at those levels.
Anti-fouling Coatings
Whenever you have something made of metal underwater, whether it is a machine, ship, facility, or whatever, bacteria and plants often cling onto the metal and over a long period of time, these bacteria and plants accumulate in large numbers and can impair the performance of that machinery (for example, ships with a large accumulation of bacteria and plants on its hull can increase the fuel requirements of the vessel). Anti-fouling nanocoatings provide the metal with a protection against these things and help the oil industry tremendously due to the fact that oil wells almost always venture underwater to extract the oil.
Whenever you are wanting to extract a specific material from the Earth, you almost always have to deal with unwanted materials that are swarming around the material that you want. This is no different in the oil industry. Often times when oil companies extract oil from the ground or underwater, they must deal with gases, metals, water, and many other types of invasive substances that are sitting in the oil. Because of this, the oil industry has had to come up with a variety of methods to clean out all of the excess materials that they don’t want in order to get pure oil. One of these methods is nanotechnology. The following is a short list of the types of nanotechnology-based filtration systems that have become part of the oil industry.
