Oil drillers interested in water-powered engine

CASPER, Wyo. (AP) — The hot water goes in. The piston goes up. Oil comes up the well.

The cold water goes in. The piston goes down. Oil goes out the pipe.

Hot water, piston up.

Cold water, piston down.

Up and down, about 1,800 times in 24 hours — or about the number of up and down strokes four pistons do in an idling car engine in about 30 seconds.

Brian Hageman's "thermal hydraulic engine," made by his Phoenix-based Deluge Inc., has been intermittently pumping oil from an old 300-foot well at the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center at the National Petroleum Reserve at the old Teapot Dome oil field.

The engine uses no fuel or electricity, just cold water and hot water. Yet Hageman's simple green dream machine has attracted the attention of the oil industry, the industry he thought would be his top competitor, he said.

According to Deluge, oil companies shut down about 15,000 stripper and marginal wells a year because the electricity and fuel costs of running the pumps make them unprofitable. Stripper wells produce less than 10 barrels of oil a day.

Hageman had another idea.

The inventor did not graduate from college and credits his lack of formal education for letting him think unconventionally, he said. However, he gained hands-on experience at Bechtel Power Corp. and Fluor-Daniels Corp., and on projects including building the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona and working at a refinery in Saudi Arabia.

The idea for his engine came in part from measuring water pressure while testing oil pipelines in Saudi Arabia. The pressure was expected to decrease as the oil moved farther away from the pump, but instead it increased because of the sun heating the oil in the pipe, Hageman said.

"That's when the light bulb went off," he said.

The concept is simpler than that, he added. A thermometer works because a liquid that's heated or cooled in the sphere at its base has nowhere to go but up or down in its tube, Hageman said.

He simply made rising and falling liquid do work by putting a piston on top of the liquid, he said.

Hageman already had formed Deluge Inc., patented the engines, enlisted about 400 investors, raised $7 million, and built at least two prototypes of the engine, according to his company's literature. People told him about Wyoming, and he called RMOTC about testing the engine.