First 20 staff employed at oil centre

In recent months, 20 new employees have moved into offices on the ground floor of Building 375. The new staff of the Danish Hydrocarbon Research and Technology Centre comprise academic directors, senior researchers, postdocs, PhD students, and a head of studies. According to Bo Cerup-Simonsen, Centre Director, the employees make up a strong team, bringing with them experience from DTU departments, DONG Energy, Maersk, Danish and international universities, and various parts of the industrial sector.

With a fixed base in the heart of Lyngby Campus, the team is already working hard to set up relationships with partner institutions such as the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, Aalborg University, the Geological Survey of Greenland and Denmark (GEUS), overseas institutions and private enterprises. The purpose is to research new technology with a view to extracting a larger proportion of Denmark’s oil and gas from North Sea deposits.

“We call Building 375 our ‘Centre Core’. It is a global centre from which we can access important data and knowledge about the oil fields, and orchestrate our research programmes in partnership with research groups outside the Centre Core. Our aim is to ensure that all our efforts are finely coordinated across fields of research and professions, across departmental boundaries, and—in the long term—across national borders as well,” explains Bo Cerup-Simonsen.

Ideas for technologies
As one of its first major assignments, the centre is launching an extensive research programme designed to identify ideas for technologies with the potential to increase oil and gas extraction from Dan, Halfdan, and Kraka—three large existing oil fields in the North Sea, where a variety of technical challenges mean that it is currently only possible to tap into a third of the total oil and gas deposits.

The research programme will encompass up to 50 projects that will be deployed at DTU, at partner institutions and in constellations involving enterprises and other universities working closely with the Danish Hydrocarbon Research and Technology Centre.

The aim over the coming three years is to identify and develop between three and five flagship programmes, each addressing one potential way to increase Danish oil extraction.

Bo Cerup-Simonsen expects to take on a new group of employees this coming autumn, and to develop working relationships with institutions and enterprises outside the Centre Core so as to link in around 100 researchers over the next three years.

Watch a video clip about the centre

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Article in DTUavisen no. 6, June 2015.