Glasspoint Solar

A company that uses solar energy to recover crude has scored big financing from some major oil players—and highlights a growing niche of global oil exploration. GlassPoint Solar last week landed a $53 million investment from Royal Dutch Shell and the sovereign investment fund of Oman for its enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technology. In a twist of irony, GlassPont's technology runs on solar power, which produces steam to help pump more fossil fuel from conventional crude plays. GlassPoint has been using this technique in Oman since 2012, and it helped the firm score more than double its initial funding. Given the age of its oil fields, Oman relies on EOR—a complex process that extracts more oil than traditional drilling—to boost production. Although EOR is common to the oil industry, using the power of the sun "is expanding very rapidly, and is a very new technology" said Rod MacGregor, GlassPoint's CEO, in an interview. "This application looks like the next step for solar."

On its face, applying renewable energy to fossil fuel drilling may seem odd. However, industry participants note it is gaining increasing currency as the oil industry attempts to rein in its carbon footprint. Read MoreShell tries to spin oil into a green (as in the environment) future

Enhanced recovery is characterized by flooding wells with carbon dioxide or steam, with major producers like Occidental Petroleum using the process more than 70 percent of the time. Natural gas is used to turn water into high pressure steam, which helps drillers access heavy oil. Consulting firm Ernst and Young sees the increasing use of EOR techniques as a hallmark of a world where the largest oil fields "are approaching depletion, and their remaining reserves are classified as hard to recover." Companies spend at least $5 billion annually on the process, according to E&Y estimates, and the need for methods to expand the efficiency of wells is particularly acute in places like Oman and Russia where oil fields are getting long in the tooth. Read MoreAn end to 'blood for oil'? Maybe not just yet