Petroleum Research Facilities
Leonard Hall
Most petroleum research is located in Leonard Hall, a four-floor 70,000 square-foot building on the UND campus. Our physical facilities, including lecture and laboratory space, are superior to those in most geoscience departments at universities similar in size and mission to UND.
Petroleum Engineering Laboratory
The Petroleum Engineering Laboratory is a 576 sq ft facility housed in the basement of Leonard Hall. The laboratory features a high pressure/high temperature acoustic core flooding system for research on enhanced oil recovery and CO2 sequestration and Schlumberger's ECLIPSE and PETREL software for reservoir simulation operations. The hardware and software in the Petroleum Engineering Lab are funded by a UND faculty start-up and ND EPSCoR, and two on-going research projects are funded by DOE through the UND EERC.
Petroleum Laboratory Equipment
- MTS Uniaxial Testing System
- AutoLab 1500 C Triaxial Testing System
- Geochemical system for surfactant imbibition
- CO2 injection system
Mining Engineering Laboratory
The Mining Engineering Laboratory is another 576 sq ft facility housed in the basement of Leonard Hall. The Laboratory contains a variety of equipment for testing rock properties and computers and software for analyses.
The Environmental Analytical Research Laboratory
EARL, formerly the Water Quality Laboratory, is housed on the third floor of Leonard Hall and is jointly administered by the School of Geology and Geological Engineering, Chemical Engineering Department, and Chemistry. The laboratory is staffed by a full-time technician and includes an inductively coupled argon plasma-atomic emission spectrometer (ICP), a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS), an ion chromatograph (IC) a total organic carbon analyzer (TOC), ion selective electrodes (ISE) and ancillary equipment to support teaching, scientific research and engineering design projects in aqueous chemistry and water resources investigations.
Wilson M. Laird Core and Sample Library
The Wilson M. Laird Core and Sample Library (North Dakota Geological Survey) is a climate controlled facility, located directly across the street from Leonard Hall. The facility consists of 2,000 square feet of office and laboratory space and 18,000 square feet of core storage. It currently houses approximately 129 kilometers of cores and approximately 40,000 boxes of drill cuttings. The cores represent about 80% of the cores cut in the North Dakota portion of the oil- and coal-rich Williston Basin, and about 95% of the samples collected. The facility also houses an extensive collection of water-well samples and cores.
F. D. Holland, Jr. Geology Library
We have a full-time staff librarian in the F. D. Holland, Jr. Geology Library which is the largest geoscience library in the upper Midwest with more than 50,000 volumes, 500 journal titles, 100,000 maps, 18,000 microfiche records, 8,000 air photos, and several hundred geological databases on CD. The library is also a depository for U.S. Government documents and specializes in U.S. Geological Survey publications.
Geophysics Facilities
- Two Geometric proton-precession magnetometers
- LaCoste and Romberg gravity meter
- Trimble 5700 and Leica System 300 real-time-kinematic GPS with sub-centimeter resolution
- Two high-resolution laser range finders
- Three solar-powered weather stations
- Divided-bar thermal conductivity apparatus, and a high-precision temperature logging system
Geothermal Laboratory
- Two divided bar systems for measuring thermal conductivity; capable of 0-69 MPa and -20 C to 150 C
- Two portable electronic divide bars for measuring thermal conductivity in the field and laboratory at ambient conditions
- 96 channel EX-300 Geode exploration seismograph capable of multiple array styles including a linear layout of up to 0.5 km at 5m spacing
- Ballistic Seismic Source system (BOSS)
- Germanium-Lithium gamma ray spectrometer for measuring uranium, thorium, and potassium for radioactive heat production in crushed rock samples
- Hand-held portable gamma-ray spectrometer
- High-precision manual temperature logging system capable of 8500 m depth and +/-0.001 C accuracy
- Two Trimble 5700 GPS receivers
- Three G-856 Memory Mag Proton Precession Magnetometers
Department Facilities
- X-Ray Diffraction Laboratory with a computer-controlled Phillips XRD using automatic peak matching software library
- Paleontology Laboratory which includes an extensive collection of invertebrate and vertebrate specimens;
- Stable Isotope Geochemistry Laboratory for isotopic analysis of waters, rocks and fossils in paleoclimate and environmental investigations