The Major Poles Of Technological Innovation.

Expansion of petroleum technologies in the past fifteen years has been particularly fast. Although we have still got a long way to go, it is clear that the advances made are already impressive. The sphere of oil and gas exploration/production has made well-identified and decisive technological advances that now need to be deepened and widened to various fields: 3D seismics and seismic interpretation, directional and great-departure well drilling, multidrain wells, well monitoring, in order to reach real interactive drilling, reservoir monitoring, new offshore prospecting channels possibility of deep sea drilling without a riser, downhole effluent separation.

In...refining, the goal is to optimize the yields, to limit the treating plant discharges and, at the end of the chain, to increase the efficiency of the equipments (boilers, motors,...) and to provide refiners and petrochemists with processes allowing to produce at low cost and while respecting the environment, the fuels and the petrochemical bases required for anticipating the evolution of the demand and of the regulations (product specifications, discharges).

As regards transport, its fast development throughout the world frustrates the impact of the considerable advances made since 15 years in the engine/fuel pair.

Thus, during the next 10 or 20 years, the challenges of technological research will have to focus on the permanent improvement in the quality of the fuels, on the reduction in the unit consumptions of vehicles and on emissions reduction (NOx, particles, ozone, ...). As for making the use of hydrocarbons clean, this first means technically suppressing, or at least reducing CO2 emissions. There are two possibilities: no CO2 production, no release of the CO2 produced into the atmosphere. No CO2 production amounts to using hydrogen instead of the carbon in the hydrocarbons. No emission of CO2, when it is produced, into the atmosphere leads to sequestration.

Besides, the use of hydrocarbons and therefore the production of CO2 essentially occurs in two ways: concentrated for the production of energy and industry, dispersed for transport and domestic use. The sequestration of CO2, whether in thermodynamic, chemical or biochemical form, is easier and less expensive when the CO2 mass is in large amount. These reflections show that, for transport and for domestic use, hydrocarbons "decarbonized" before combustion offer a clean solution, whereas sequestration offers a clean solution for industrial use and energy supply. But what is a "decarbonized" hydrocarbon? Simply as regards chemistry, it is hydrogen since hydrocarbons are the main natural source of hydrogen in the non-oxidized state, i.e. in a state likely to provide energy. However, hydrogen, although it is a remarkable clean fuel (its combustion in internal-combustion engines or fuel cells producing only water), is a very volatile and therefore dangerous body...