May 11, 2017   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Three Winners Announced at 2017 Shale Gas Innovation Contest Final’s Event!

On May 9, 2017, at the Final’s Event for the Sixth Annual Shale Gas Innovation Contest, the following three companies each walked away with a winner’s check for $20,000:

  • Frontier Natural Resources, Inc. - Commercialized the first small scale natural gas liquefaction facility in Pennsylvania utilizing natural gas from an adjacent gathering and compression facility. The second site under development uses stranded natural gas which opens opportunities across the state and nation.
  • PetroMar Technologies, Inc. - Commercializing FracView™, a low-cost LWD borehole imaging tool utilizing advanced, dynamically-focused acoustic transducer technology to obtain a very high resolution acoustic borehole image in any oil/synthetic liquid or synthetic mud system.
  • Sensor Networks, Inc. - Offering a product line of permanently installed battery powered ultrasonic sensors, providing remote, wireless data collection of critical piping infrastructure's wall thickness.

In addition to the three winners, a fourth technology submitted by Kelly Rose, a Technology, Geology, and Geospatial Researcher at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), was highly praised by the judges/attendees and was named the Innovative R&D Winner. NETL has developed a cost-effective and near real-time early kick detection system that leverages data obtained from logging while drilling, measurement while drilling, or seismic while drilling signals to provide an early warning before the kick ascends to the rig floor.

Two winners were also announced for posters presented by students from CMU and Penn State. The winners were:

  • Cold Energy Recovery from LNG Regasification, submitted by Nyla Khan, M.S. Civil & Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Fast and Robust Pattern Recognition for Re-Stimulation Candidate Selection using Subsurface Big Data, submitted by Eddie Udegbe, PhD Candidate, Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University

Finalist presentations and additional details on the event are posted at http://www.sgicc.org/2017-shale-gas-innovation-contest.html.