The beauty of attending several trade shows a year is that we E&P editors get to witness the evolution of a product from its tentative first steps onto the stage under the bright lights of a splashy introduction to the point where it is embraced by the oil and gas industry as a tried-and-true product of the field. What I find most impressive is the number of inventive ways the industry has developed to “skin the cat” of oil and gas production.

Take, for example, proppant. It can be grains of sand or spheres of ceramic, but both perform the same function of keeping hairline fractures propped open in reservoir formations. In offshore applications bauxite has been the proppant of choice due to its strength and high fracture conductivity in extreme downhole environments. Operators at work in the HP/HT reservoirs of the deepwater Gulf of Mexico’s (GoM’s) Lower Tertiary trend now have a new prop-pant option, Kryptosphere.

Carbo launched the new proppant at the recent SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans. According to the company, Kryptosphere is an ultra-conductive, ultra-high strength prop-pant technology that was “engineered to maximize and sustain hydrocarbon flow at high closure stresses for the life of the well.”

The company was first approached by a major GoM operator in 2007 to develop a “durable, high-strength proppant that can deliver twice the baseline conductivity of existing bauxite proppants at 20,000-psi closure stresses.” During the past six years, the company has worked and made significant investments in the development, testing, and commercialization of such a proppant. In fact, not only has it met the goal of providing twice the baseline conductivity, it also exhibits a significantly lower inertial coefficient (beta), higher conductivity under stress cycling, and considerably better acid resistance.

“Kryptosphere will significantly improve overall fracture conductivity or space to flow, resulting in more production, increased recoverable reserves, and greater returns for the operator,” Don Conkle, vice president of marketing and sales for Carbo, said.

“Carbo’s expertise within materials science and manufacturing has enabled our team to develop this more conductive and more durable proppant technology, which is expected to be significantly less erosive to downhole tools and assets during pumping.”

According to the company, Kryptosphere is unique in that its “precision-engineered microstructure translates into a stronger, more spherical, more uniform, and smoother proppant that creates more space in the fracture for hydrocarbon flow as well as a more uniform flow path.”

And with more room to “flow,” there will be more product in the pipeline, which is never a bad thing.