Yesterday the three-year-old company announced the second commercial installation of its pioneering imgne X3 solution at a Queensland CSG site comprising more than 10,000sq.km of bidim C geotextiles, manufactured by Geofabrics Australia.
Imagine's conductive coating enables detection of holes as small as 0.7mm using pre-existing, proven electrical system techniques.
Imagine IM head of R&D Phil Aitchison and business development chief Dave Giles-Kaye examining Geofabrics bidim-C coated with imgne(r) X3 in the ExelPlas testing facility.
CEO Chris Gilbey told Energy News that the fundamental proposition for Imagine's technology is that geotextiles have a strategic value within civil engineering - and CSG - to manage water.
"Whether you're building a road, building or a dam, one of the big issues is potential damage caused by or to water," he said.
"Initially our thoughts were this is a significant focus area within the geosynthetics space which is worth about $16 billion globally.
"While the part we're targeting is a very small part of that, what we've determined over the past 18 months, since we've been working to get this product in this market, is that the leakage in dams, and in particular CSG applications, appears to be one of the significant niche drivers in the overall geosynthetics business."
Gilbey said Imagine now wants to expand this not just across Queensland's CSG sector but globally, starting with Alberta, where the potential market is "much, much bigger" - albeit nascent.
"That's our next big push,' he said.
The Alberta Geological Survey estimates there may be up to 500 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Canadian province's coals.
However, the agency also said it doesn't know how much of this gas may be economic to produce.
"As more information becomes available the production potential will become clearer," the agency said, with the majority of CSG development taking place in the dry Horseshoe Canyon area, where there is 179Tcf ultimate gas in place.
Work was also done in the Belly River coal zones along the Calgary-Red Deer corridor.
Wells targeting these seams tend to produce gas with little or no water, with production referred to as "dry coal bed methane".
The first commercial production of CBM in Alberta was from these coals, and they constitute the majority of CBM reserves booked. The depth range of these coals is 200-800m.
The vision of Imagine, which has been purely backed by private equity thus far, is to develop fibers and textiles for industry that are self-reporting and lead toward the Internet of Things - what Gilbey and his colleagues think of the ‘Internet of Industrial Materials'.
"This product is the first instance of that, albeit a relatively low-level, pedestrian application," he said.
"But in terms of graphene it's potentially one of the largest market applications."
Imagine has built a pilot plant in Victoria with an output capacity of about 10 tonnes per annum, which could just about serve that application, with a plan to build another plant in North America in the next 6-9 months to service that market.
With increasing demand in the oil and gas space, Imagine is also planning a second plant in Australia.
"Our whole focus in terms of profitability is only to work where there is a high volume application, where the full market is going to require that we sell many tonnes of material," Gilbey said.
While Imagine has not yet estimated how big the Queensland CSG market will be, with some 40,000 wells planned over the life of the three LNG projects they will feed, Gilbey said modular plants could easily be replicated close to where the coating will be deployed.
Geofabrics, Australia's largest geotextile manufacturing business in Melbourne, has a plant in Albury and just outside of Brisbane, likely to be the site of Imagine's next plant.
"As long as we can be close to their manufacturing, that will mean we can keep the prices tight so we can be competitive," he said.
The company is also targeting mining, having recently won a National Energy Resources Australia grant to help develop sensing textiles that can be used in mining operations that could report on the structural health of various types of underground mines.
