SAUDI ARABIA. Microscopic nanorobots may sound as futuristic as
flying saucers and teleportation, but research already is under
way at Saudi Aramco to put nanotechnology to work in oil
reservoirs throughout the Kingdom. Many people think of the oil
“reservoir” as a tank. But in the petroleum industry, the
reservoir is solid rock, as solid as the wall in your office -
or even more so. Oil is trapped in tiny pores within these rocks
and travels between the pores through small passageways called
“pore throats,” which are even smaller than the pores.
Nanorobots must be small enough to pass through the pore
throats. So anything that moves through the reservoir has to be
smaller yet; it has to be at the nanoscale. Last year, Saudi
Aramco’s EXPEC Advanced Research Centre (EXPEC ARC) introduced
the concept of Resbots, or reservoir robots - tiny nanorobots
less than 1/100th the width of a human hair - that could one day
be deployed like an army in reservoirs through injected water.
During their journey, they would ana