Kleiner Perkins invests in second oil exploration company, GloriOil

Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that preaches the need to invest in green technologies and reduce global warming, has invested in a second company that seeks to produce more oil.

The firm has joined an Indian research group, TERI, and private equity investor GTI to invest $10 million in Houston’s GloriOil, a company boasting a new technology that helps oil companies get more oil out of existing wells.

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This follow news in March that Kleiner invested in another oil exploration company Terralliance.

Both investments were made quietly, with no announcement. Kleiner has not yet responded to a request for comment made late yesterday.

Kleiner’s leading partner John Doerr has led a crusade to stop the damage caused by global warming caused by greenhouse emissions and has publicly broken down in tears over the issue. Investing in oil exploration, of course, makes it possible to drill oil more efficiently, and produce greenhouse emissions in even greater amounts, and stands in contradiction to the firm’s stated public mission. Explaining its first investment, in Terralliance, Kleiner made the somewhat shaky argument investments like this reduce waste associated with traditional drilling, and so are making a helpful contribution.

The company adds a mixture of microbes and nutrients into the ground that stimulates growth of the active agents in a shut-in area which generate oil. The company returns three weeks later to recoup the oil. It boasts that wells treated this way triples production.

The company was founded in 2005, and based on technology developed by the Energy and Resources Institute, a New Delhi, India research organization, which has studied oil recovery for a decade. It is also testing the technology with private companies in Texas.

The news follows a $12 million investment into another oil recovery company, DynaPump. Investors included DFJ Element, NGP Energy Technology Partners and existing investor CTTV Investments (Chevron’s investment arm), and it is the company’s third round.

Update: We’re told SiliconTap first mentioned the investment several days ago.