Spring inventor acknowledged with patent for sand control device

An improved system for keeping sand out of oil in drilling operations has led to a U.S. patent for a Spring man and his research partner.

Well operators are always looking for new ways to reduce the amount of debris in the valuable commodities they extract from the earth. In its patent, Bruce A. Dale of Sugar Land and Charles S. Yeh of Spring claim to have accomplished this through a design that incorporates greater redundancy in order to screen out more sand. The inventors claim it could be particularly useful in deep-sea drilling operations.

The patent's official number is 7,891,420. It was originally filed on July 26, 2006, and officially approved on Feb. 22 of this year. The owner of the patent is listed as the Houston offices of the ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company.

According to the ExxonMobil website, Upstream is a division dedicated to developing proprietary technology that addresses problems the company encounters while attempting to maintain production from its wells. ExxonMobil is a major multinational oil and gas company and one of the world's largest publicly traded corporations. Though its headquarters is located in Irving, Texas, the company also has a major presence in Houston.