Dr. Gang Han is a Petroleum Engineering Consultant at Aramco Services
Company. He has worked in global oil and gas fields to address geomechanics
issues related to unconventional development, reservoir performance,
production optimization, and well planning and construction. His expertise
includes hydraulic fracturing, reservoir geomechanics, sand management and
control, well integrity, and salt modeling. He has 55+ publications, and is a
leading author of the book, Drilling in Extreme Environments. He holds a PhD
in Chemical Engineering/Geomechanics from the University of Waterloo. As a
member of SPE, AAPG, SEG, he is also a former “Future Leader” of ARMA.
Since October 2009, John McLennan has been a USTAR Associate Professor in the
Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah. He has been a
Senior Research Scientist at the Energy & Geoscience Institute and an Adjunct
Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering since January 2008. With a Ph.D.
in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto, he has more than thirty-five
years of experience with petroleum service and technology companies. He worked
nine years for Dowell Schlumberger. Later, John was with TerraTek in Salt Lake
City, Advantek International in Houston, and ASRC Energy Services in Anchorage.
He has worked on projects related to subsurface energy recovery (hydrocarbon,
geothermal) in a variety of reservoir environments, throughout the world.
Dr. Joseph P. Morris leads the Computational Geosciences Group at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). His group develops numerical models for
the behavior of rock for defense and energy applications. Dr. Morris has led and
contributed technically to DOE projects to develop hydraulic fracture simulators.
LLNL developed a next-generation hydraulic fracturing simulator, GEOS, to
provide higher-fidelity predictions of hydraulic fracture behavior. Dr. Morris also
spent 5 years with Schlumberger Research and helped develop fracturing
technologies with reduced water requirements. In 2015, Dr. Morris served as an
expert contributing recommendations to the State of California for HF
monitoring.
Ahmad Ghassemi is a Rock Mechanics Professor and McCasland Chair in the
Mewbourne School of Petroleum & Geological Engineering, OU. He has Ph.D. in
Geological Engineering. He has been working on high-temperature reservoir
rock mechanics and hydraulic fracturing research for the past 20 years with
emphasis on numerical modeling of thermo-poroelastic effects, induced
seismicity, and the impact of rock heterogeneity on stimulated volume. In 2012
he received the Geothermal Resources Council Special Achievement Award for
outstanding contributions to the modeling of coupled chemical-thermalmechanical processes and rock-fluid interactions in geothermal reservoirs.
Maurice teaches Geological Engineering and does research in the deep
underground at Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at University of
Waterloo. His interests include hydraulic fracturing, energy storage,
geothermal energy, mining, and deep waste injection. He holds a number of
international patents and has about 500 papers published in journals and
conferences. Maurice is a well-known educator and advisor, and in the last few
years has served as advisor to five different Canadian provinces and the
Northwest Territories on matters relating to energy development, fracturing,
technology and innovation.
Mukul M. Sharma is Professor and the “Tex” Moncrief Chair in the Department
of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin
where he has been for the past 30 years. His current research interests include
hydraulic fracturing, oilfield water management, formation damage and
improved oil recovery. He has published more than 300 journal articles and
conference proceedings and has 14 patents. Sharma has a PhD in chemical and
petroleum engineering from the University of Southern California. Among his
many awards, Dr. Sharma is the recipient of the 2009 Lucas Gold Medal, SPE’s
highest technical award.
M. Y. Soliman is the George P. Livermore Professor of Petroleum Engineering at
Texas Tech University. Before TTU, Professor Soliman worked for Halliburton
Energy for more than 30 years in several technical and managerial positions.
He has authored and co-authored more 200 technical papers and holds 27 US
patents. M. Soliman a Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1978. His
areas of interest include well test analysis, diagnostic testing, fracturing and
numerical simulation. He is a distinguished member of SPE and a licensed
professional engineer by the State of Texas. He is also a fellow of the National
Academy of Inventors (NAI).
Xiaowei Weng is an Advisor in Hydraulic Fracture Modeling with
Schlumberger and Project Manager of Modeling and Mechanics in Sugar
Land, Texas, USA. He received his MS and PhD degrees in Engineering
Mechanics from the University of Texas at Austin. He has 25 years of industry
experience, 9 years with ARCO E&P Technology, and 16 years with
Schlumberger. He has engaged in the research and simulation model
development in hydraulic fracturing, acid fracturing, multi-fractured
horizontal well completion and production, wellbore hydraulics, coiled tubing
cleanout and DTS inversion. He is a member of SPE and ARMA and authored
and co-authored over 40 technical papers.
Dr. Viswanathan is the Subsurface Flow and Transport team leader of the Earth
and Environmental Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. An
expert in subsurface flow and transport modeling, he has over 70 publications
in the area of energy security and currently leads a large multi-disciplinary
project on reducing the water footprint of hydraulic fracturing operations. He
is a co-developer of two LANL codes that have established an international
reputation: FEHM and CO2-PENS. He holds a PhD in Environmental
Engineering.
Dr. Mack is General Manager of Itasca Houston, and Geomechanics Director
for Itasca Microseismic and Geomechanical Evaluation (IMaGE). He has more
than 25 years of experience in geomechanics and hydraulic fracture simulation.
Mark has a Ph.D. in Geomechanics from the University of Minnesota. Mark
worked for Itasca before joining Schlumberger where he spent 22 years
working on various aspects of hydraulic fracturing, including developing
hydraulic fracture models and applying geomechanics to microseismic
measurements. He was the Vice President of Engineering and Chief Operating
Officer at Oxane Materials before rejoining Itasca in 2015. Mark has published
about 30 technical papers and three book chapters.
Morita is a new professor of Harold Vance Department of Petroleum
Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. He was a professor
of resources and environmental engineering department, Waseda University,
Japan, with a rock mechanics and completion engineering lab. He was a
research fellow, ConocoPhillips, for 13 years. He is teaching the following
courses at Texas A&M University: Non-linear rock mechanics, Finite element
methods for application to petroleum engineering problems, Boundary
element methods for application to petroleum engineering problems.
Sau-Wai Wong is an advisor for Unconventional Technology in Shell’s R&D
organization in Houston. He is the Principal Technical Expert in Geomechanics
for worldwide E&P operation. He started with Shell Research in The Netherlands
27 years ago, and subsequently fulfilled international assignments in Oman, The
Netherlands, Malaysia and USA. He was the Subsurface Technology Manager for
Unconventional Oil and later the R&D Manager for Unconventional Gas
Technology. With a Ph.D. in Engineering from University of Manchester (UK), he
is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the School of Earth Sciences, University of
Melbourne, Australia. He was a Distinguished Lecturer for SPE in 2009-2010.
Dr. Thomas Doe is a part of the FracMan Technology Group in Golder Associates,
which specializes in discrete fracture network (DFN) approaches to fluid flow
and transport. He competed his PhD in at the University of Wisconsin in geology
and geomechanics and started his career at LBL in 1977. His major areas of
work have included hydraulic fracturing, stress measurement, well tests using
fracture network models. Dr. Doe is past president of the American Rock
Mechanics Association and former member of the National Academy of Science
Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering. He holds adjunct
positions at the Universities of Washington and Utah.
Dr. A. (Tony) Settari held the Encana/Petroleum Society of CIM Endowed Chair
in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Calgary from 2001 to 2013, and is
one of the principals in CGG-TAURUS. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Mechanical
Engineering from the University of Calgary in 1973. He works primarily in
reservoir simulation and engineering, hydraulic fracturing and reservoir
geomechanics. He authored and co-authored three textbooks and over 150
technical publications. He received several international prizes including the SPE
Anthony B. Lucas Gold Medal in 2008, the Eni Prize “Frontiers in hydrocarbons”
in 2009, and the SPE Cedric Ferguson Certificate in 2011.
Jon Olson is the chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering
Department at The University of Texas at Austin. He has been a professor at UTAustin since 1995, before which he was a research engineer for Mobil Research
and Development Company. He specializes in hydraulic fracturing, reservoir
geomechanics and other topics related to rock fracture, including naturally
fracture reservoir characterization. Olson has BS degrees in Civil Engineering
and Earth Sciences, and has a PhD in Geomechanics from Stanford University.
Dr. Neal Nagel has nearly 30 years of oilfield geomechanics experience having
started as a college professor and then with Phillips Petroleum in the 1980s. He
has provided geomechanics consulting since 2009 and geomechanics training
since the late 80s. He has given many invited SPE, AAPG, HGS, SEG, and SPWLA
presentations, and authored or coauthored more than 50 technical papers. He is
a past SPE Distinguished Lecturer (2004), will be a 2016 SPE Distinguished
Lecturer on Stress Shadows from Hydraulic Fracturing, and was chief editor of
the 2010 SPE Monograph on Solids Injection.