VCCircle

GloriOil, a Houston, Texas-based biotechnology company backed by India's The Energy Research Institute (TERI), has raised $10 million in financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a private investment firm GTI Group, which co-founded and seeded the company. GloriOil has developed a technology which improves the recovery efficiency and also reduce the operating costs of oil fields. The company has successfully applied biotechnology in mature fields in the Texas Panhandle and West Texas in the US.

The India Connection

GloriOil's patented Enhanced Oil Recovery by Microbial Consortia (EORMC) process was in development for 10 years at the Delhi-based TERI, which was earlier called Tata Energy Research Institute. The value proposition GloriOil gives is that it would help increase oil production while lowering the producer's lifting costs. According to KPCB Partner Joseph Lacob, GloriOil's technology "will deliver much-needed improvements in recovery efficiency to many of the world's 30,000 producing oil and gas fields".

TERI is also one of the shareholders in the privately-held GloriOil, which was co-founded by GTI in 2005. But its origins go back to 1997 when India's ONGC commissioned TERI to develop a microbial enhanced oil recovery technology to improve the production of its mature fields. Over the next seven years, "TERI scientists worked to advance a technology that has been in marginal use for over 50 years. Between 2001 and 2004 their technical developments were used on 25 wells in 3 fields in India with extraordinary results. The success of this pilot work led to bigger MEOR programs in India, and to the birth of GloriOil," says the company website.

Will ONGC get to use the technology free of cost is the question now?