$80 Million Bet Says Wyoming Can Unlock Secret To Getting More Oil From "Tight Rocks"

LARAMIE — Oil wells today still leave most of their resources trapped in the ground. Anywhere from 85% to 95% of the resource remains in tight oil rocks that won’t let go of their black gold.

Cracking the code to squeezing even 1% more from those rocks is worth billions of dollars to the oil and gas sector, and it’s an area where Wyoming has been quietly taking a worldwide lead.

Wyoming is so far ahead of the pack on this, in fact, that ThermoFisher Scientific, an applied science research company and a Fortune 500 company, has just placed a $40 million bet that the Cowboy State will be where the next big innovation in oil and gas extraction happens.

ThermoFisher’s $40 million bet has been matched by another $40 million from the Wyoming Legislature for a total of $80 million that will be flowing into the Center of Innovation for Flow Through Porous Media, headed by Dr. Mohammed Piri at University of Wyoming’s High Bay Research Facility.

Piri told Cowboy State Daily the money will be used to acquire new scientists and new instrumentation, as well as corresponding software decks to integrate artificial intelligence on huge, three-dimensional data sets from Wyoming and other oil and gas plays.

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