General Electric Company (GE 1.30%) and Devon Energy Corporation (DVN 0.98%) announced Monday that they have entered into a new technology sharing and collaboration agreement aimed at enabling both corporations to expand and improve unconventional oil and natural gas projects.
The deal was announced at General Electric's groundbreaking ceremony for its Oil & Gas Technology Center in Oklahoma City, where Devon Energy is based.
According to the company's press release, the two companies will focus on three main objectives:
- Improving artificial lift systems to increase production well flow.
- Enhancing drill performance to cut costs and decrease environmental damage.
- Explore water treatment and processing technology options to reduce water use for drilling projects.
"Our new TCA [Technology Collaboration Agreement] with Devon builds on years of collaboration with the goal of helping unconventional projects reach new levels of efficiency and production capacity," said Lorenzo Simonelli, president and CEO of GE Oil & Gas, in today's press release. "We will collaborate with Devon using the GE Oil & Gas Technology Center to develop ideas that can be quickly tested in the field. We aim to quickly deploy technologies that can improve the economics and operational performance of unconventional oil and gas projects throughout the United States and around the world ... "
For Devon's part, President and CEO John Richels was quoted in the press release as saying that his company's "long-standing commitment to developing innovative approaches to produce oil and natural gas" makes this latest GE collaboration a "great opportunity" to improve technological progress.
