Clarke Turner grew up a long way from Wyoming’s high prairie, where he now makes his home. He was raised in the treed hillsides of New York’s Catskill region, in the village of Walton, an hour or so east of Binghamton.

Turner headed west for college, and after he graduated from Colorado School of Mines he joined the U.S. Army. A military career as a petroleum management officer took him to Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, South Korea, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. His work centered on management of petroleum contracts, and included operation of the Trans-Korean pipeline.

After 11 years of active duty, Turner returned to civilian life and consulted for Louisiana Land and Exploration for a short time. He later took a position with the Department of Energy, at Naval Petroleum Reserves 1 and 2 in Elk Hills, California.

In 1993, he moved to Casper, Wyoming, to become assistant director of the Naval Petroleum Reserves in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming (NPOSR-CUW), returning to a position he had held as a military officer. NPOSR-CUW operations included exploration and production of both the Naval Petroleum Reserve 3, more familiarly known as the historic Teapot Dome Field, and an unconventional tight-gas-sands field near Rifle, Colorado.

In 1995 Turner became director, and coordinated a local grass-roots effort to develop an additional mission for NPOSR-CUW: the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center. The center uses as its laboratory Teapot Dome Field, which spans 10,000 acres some 35 miles north of Casper. It’s a working oilfield ready-made for field testing of new energy-related technologies in partnership with inventors, small companies, the oil and gas industry and academia.

In 2002, Turner took a short respite from the RMOTC when he was selected to be the Secretary of Energy’s representative on a task force for oil plans and policies for Iraq. Shortly thereafter, as a volunteer civilian, he led a DOE team into Iraq to assist the Department of Defense in protecting oil infrastructure during the war. Turner arrived in Baghdad four days after it fell to U.S. forces, and during the immediate reconstruction period he worked on rebuilding the Iraqi Oil Ministry and national oil company.

Aside from that service, Turner has been at the helm of RMOTC for all of its past 15 years.

“The biggest problem in technology development is moving from prototype to widespread use,” says Turner. “The first field applications are the most difficult to get off the ground, because of economics and possible safety and environmental liabilities, and that’s where we come in. It is very fulfilling to help our customers bring their ideas to the marketplace and to know that we’re having an impact on our domestic energy portfolio.”

The testing center was launched with the guidance of an advisory committee. The state of Wyoming provided initial funding of $500,000, which the federal government subsequently stepped up to $3 million.

A decade and a half later, the testing center continues to fulfill its mission, partnering with service companies and equipment manufacturers to test new ideas and products that may lower operating costs, decrease carbon footprints or lead to better reservoir recovery. Clients range from inventors eager to test new technologies to national labs running experiments to university instructors. The center assumes safety and environmental liabilities for technologies it tests, and it is a neutral entity.

Investigations at RMOTC range widely across such areas as artificial lift, enhanced oil recovery, production testing and renewable energy. Environmental technologies are a key focus, particularly those that aim to cut the carbon footprints of traditional oilfield activities.

“Much of our work is with drilling technologies, because we have an operating drilling rig,” says Turner. Drilling has changed rapidly during the past few decades, and today’s widespread horizontal development of unconventional reservoirs is a result of technology innovations. “Now people want to make rotary steerable technologies smaller and more accurate, and drill wells faster and deeper.”

Beneficial use of produced water is another point of interest, as is the application of hybrid technologies that combine renewable energy with oilfield applications.

"We generate electricity with high-temperature produced water, and we are working with tapping the energy in waste-heat streams in the industry,” Turner says.