From Academia To The Fortune 500
Situation
As one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the energy industry, Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. operates oil well sites among its myriad energy services. To ensure the safety of their oil wells, they routinely check the oil-to-gas ratios and other key details by taking samples that are sent off-site to a lab for testing.
Solution
USC Chemistry professor and Ometric founder, Dr. Michael Myrick, developed a scanning technology called Multivariate Optical ComputingTM (MOC) that allows a company to look inside a product or pipeline to check the chemical contents inside, eliminating the need for samples to be sent to a laboratory for testing.
“This is exactly what a research university should be doing…taking research and translating it to the marketplace where it can be applied to change lives, protect the environment and improve our health.”
Results
Not only did the scanning technology save Halliburton time and money, they also paid USC $2.75 million to acquire it, marking the first time a startup based on USC technology has been bought by a Fortune 500 company. In addition, USC has retained the rights to use and develop the technology for use in all other fields except energy. Licensing application opportunities include agriculture, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage testing, and more.
Discover technology commercialization opportunities at the University of South Carolina.