OREANDA-NEWS. February 26, 2013. Qatar Petroleum (QP), Total E&P Qatar and Q Analytica LLC signed a Joint Research and Development Agreement on Petroleum Profiling, a technology used to characterize the chemical composition of crude oil, reported the press-centre of QP.

The agreement was signed at QP headquarters by Mr. Issa Shahin Al-Ghanim, Director for Strategic Planning & Policy of QP; Mr. Stephane Michel, Managing Director of Total E&P Qatar; and Dr. John Hassard, General Manager of Q Analytica LLC.

Also present during the signing ceremony were many senior officials from the three companies, including Dr. Nasser Saqer Al-Mohannadi, Manager for Research and Technology, and Dr. Ahmad Aldahik, Senior Researcher in Geochemistry of QP; Mr. Arnaud Breuillac, Senior Vice-President of Total E&P Middle East, and Dr. Phillipe Julien, Director of Total Research Center – Qatar (TRC-Q); Mr Khalid Hubail, Vice President of New Technologies and Mr. Julien Chapron, Technical Manager of Q Analytica LLC.

“This new research agreement is the second one we have with Total and we are also highly pleased to partner with Q Analytica in this project, thus allowing us to bring our resources and expertise together in developing new methodologies and technologies for the continued development of the global oil and gas industry,” said Mr. Al-Ghanim, who is also the Chairman of QP’s Research and Technology Steering Committee.

“We are very pleased to sign this new research agreement on the geochemistry of carbonate reservoirs with Qatar Petroleum and Q Analytica. This follows a previous agreement signed last year with Qatar Petroleum on acid stimulation. This clearly shows the will of Total to share its research and technology with Qatari partners in general and particularly with Qatar Petroleum,” said Mr. Stephane Michel, Managing Director of Total E&P Qatar.

“Q Analytica, a Qatari advanced technology company, is deeply honoured to have been selected by Qatar Petroleum and Total E&P as a partner in this important analysis and development programme. Our underlying analytical technology has been adopted in a wide range of biomedical programmes, including  the world's largest rapid vaccine development programme, but the Rapid Petroleomic Profiling programme is our first in this vital sector and offers the potential to transform our ability to analyse hydrocarbons in real-time as they are delivered to the oil well. We will be manufacturing systems in Qatar in the next stage, in full alignment with and in support of Qatar National Vision 2030,” said Dr. John Hassard, General Manager of Q Analytica LLC.

The joint research project will be implemented in three phases, and it comes in accordance with the R&D strategy of QP in knowledge transfer and technologies development. The main objective of the project is to analyze the opportunity in acquiring the techniques applied in biomedical research into oil and gas research fields. The research work will be undertaken at the laboratories of QP and Total at the Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP).

Also known as “oil fingerprinting,” petroleum profiling is used to identify and quantify all components of crude oil and to study how these components affect the properties and reactivity of that specific crude oil. Although conventional techniques for petroleum profiling already exist, the research project of QP, Total and Q Analytica will study the possibility of acquiring the new technologies currently applied in the biomedical field and then using these in oil and gas operations to enhance the oil fingerprinting task, thus making it easier, faster and more sensitive.

The research partners expect to file a number of patents out of the research work in the first year of project implementation, and the success of the project will eventually have great positive impacts on QP’s offshore and onshore operational units.