Construction
Construction and building products represent key industrial businesses critical for People’s daily life: House. In North America, besides traditional construction materials such as lumber, plywood, oriented strand boards, insulated foam boards, concrete products such as cements and aggregate materials are the most of utilized materials applied in the industry. in addition, highway road’s construction, bridges slab, and high-rising building, foundation of concrete slabs are typical application examples.
In general, the builders and home owners would like to have a poured concrete slab setting up within 24 hr. without cracking defects and fissures having at least 10 years of warrantee without cracking the poured concretes. As well-known, concrete has a strong compressive strength as high as 4000 (PSI) used for residential application, however, one drawback of the hydraulic-cement concretes is that it has a poor tensile strength. As such, cracking and fissures are observed everywhere as shown in Figure 1 if the mixing recipes are not appropriately prepared with special chemicals admixture involved in the formation of concrete.
AquluMax is a newly developed bio-inspired self-healing multifunctional coating, a chemical solution by gMI, LLC, useful for improving the tensile strength of concrete products in the residential and commercial markets. it significantly reduces the concrete crack defects with an enhanced service life. The product is in the pending phase for scaling up commercialization.
Oil and Gas for Upstream Energy
In upstream of oil and gas energy market, based upon Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) in July 2021, the decline in drilled but, uncompleted wells (DUCs) reflects more well completions and less new well drilling activity. The completion of more wells is increasing oil production, meanwhile, they are also reducing the DUC inventories. Oil production growth in the coming months could be limited.
Two main stages in bringing a horizontally drilled, hydraulically fractured well online are drilling and completion. Since the Pandemics, the wells completed to increase by 15 (%) in 2020 at 7600 (well), a decrease of 55.0 (%) in comparison to 2019. Permian basin accounts for 45 (%) of the total more than 7600 DUC wells. The forecast growth rate for energy growth is expected to be 15 to 20(%) in the next 10 years or so in U.S. until 2030 levelled off. The oil price is expected to be increased further from current 100 USD/Barrel to 150 USD/Barrel (https;//www.eia.gov/todayinenery/detail.php?id=49456).
in addition, in a EIA published annual report cited here, the outlook of 2021 with projections to 2050 for the liquid and natural gas price will increase in an upward trend in a favor of continuous innovation and introduction of new technologies for profitable growth. Oil field chemicals and surface modified proppants with competitive pricing are critical components to reduce the raw materials and product’s cost and increase the operational efficiency. An adaption of the new disruptive technologies is the key for supply chain cost reductions.
During the pandemics period, the industry has successfully transferred the North White sand as proppants into 40/70 and 100mesh local sand with significant cost saving, however, new unsolved issues are coming simultaneously in this transition. For instance, challenging issues in the 40/70 and 100mesh are that the products are dusty, and easy to create cavitation and wear-out the pumping equipment. Special shipping containers and trucking tools have to be used to transport wet local sand from frac sand plants to oil and gas field.
AquLuMax 4-400 is a bioinspired multifunctional coating developed recently by mimicking the micro surface of carnivorous pitcher plants. The coating itself is slippery without sticky, while it is wet. There is no need for the proppants to be dried during shipping if the proppants are coated with AquLuMax 4-400. 60-90 (%) thermal energy could be potentially saved. For further information in detail, please visit the product’s section in this website.
Specialty and IP of Innovations
The raw materials used in the patent pending multifunctional components are originated from bio-based renewable agricultural products and plus the special synthetic polymer materials. As such, in addition that it can be applied in oil and gas energy and construction, it should be and would be excellent technological platforms for other applications. With identified unmet demand from other special markets, it is likely that the manufactured chemical additives could be applied as special niche product’s platforms for others, etc. The gMI, LLC would follow special product’s development protocols for the product’s IP and innovations as a true innovator.