TPH Partners, a middle market energy private equity fund, has closed an equity investment in a growth round of funding for Ingrain, an oilfield technology firm that specialises in digital rock physics analysis.
Ingrain uses proprietary technologies to analyse reservoir rock samples from cores or drill cuttings and deliver critical data to its oil and gas producer client base.
“We are very excited about the potential provided to the exploration and production industry by the evolving science of digital rock physics, and Ingrain is the clear leader in this field,” says Joe B. Foster, chairman of TPH Partners. “Ingrain’s techniques are especially relevant to producers that work with low permeability reservoirs, such as tight-gas sands and shales, as well as complex carbonate reservoirs and oil sands, where traditional physical core analysis methods often face difficulties. These types of reservoirs will be more intensely exploited in the future.”
Ingrain was founded in 2007 by Dr. Amos Nur and Dr. Henrique Tono to commercialise their petrophysical developments and a patented method of computing physical properties from very high resolution digital images of reservoir rock captured with three dimensional CT scanning.
The company reveals reservoir rocks “from the inside” and computes critical rock properties, including permeability, porosity, elastic properties, electrical properties and relative permeability.
Ingrain also stores these digital images in its proprietary vRock format, providing its customers the capability of subsequently analyzing the reservoir under changed conditions.
