CPGE: Reservoir Engineering: Staff

Reservoir Engineering Staff

	Steven L. Bryant, Program Manager steven_bryant@mail.utexas.edu Dr. Bryant's interests include multiscale modeling of reservoir processes, using parallel computing to address large-scale subsurface flow and transport applications, and the engineering aspects of microbial enhanced oil recovery. He is also interested in applying techniques for predicting reservoir quality to inform methods of reservoir characterization.
	Matthew Balhoff balhoff@mail.utexas.edu Prof. Balhoff's research interests include pore-scale and multiscale modeling; flow and transport in porous media.
	Mojdeh Delshad delshad@mail.utexas.edu Dr. Mojdeh Delshad, an Associate Research Professor, earned her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from The University of Texas at Austin both in Petroleum Engineering and a BS degree from Aryamehr University in Iran in Chemical Engineering. She has 18 years of experience in modeling multiphase flow, property modeling, and reservoir simulation and more than 10 years of experience in modeling and designing subsurface contaminant transport and remediation processes. She has been involved in the design of several tracer and surfactant and surfactant/foam field tests using UTCHEM flow and transport numerical model. She is in charge of UTCHEM development and user support.
	David Dicarlo dicarlo@mail.utexas.edu Prof. DiCarlo's research interests include using advanced experimental techniques such as multi-energy CT scanning, synchrotron radiation, and acoustical measurements. These techniques are used to connect the laboratory scale to the pore scale and reservoir scale on topics such as three-phase, compositional, fracture, and preferential flow in the subsurface.
	Chun Huh chunhuh@mail.utexas.edu Prof. Huh's research interests include process modeling for various enhanced oil recovery processes, such as surfactant/microemulsion flooding, polymer flooding, miscible and near-miscible gas injection processes, use of foam to improve effectiveness of chemical and gas injection processes, and heavy oil recovery from unconsolidated sands. Having previously worked in a major oil industry research laboratory tackling various oil recovery problems, Prof. Huh's main focus has been improvement of the EOR model features that require modification from actual field application of those processes, and the adaptation of those improvements for reservoir simulators for improved field performance.
	Russell T. Johns rjohns@mail.utexas.edu Russell T. Johns is Associate Professor in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He has served on the faculty since 1995 and holds the Pioneer Corporation Faculty Fellowship within the department. He has nine years of industrial experience as a petrophysical engineer with Shell Oil in New Orleans, Houston, and Bakersfield and as a hydrogeological engineer for Colenco Power Consulting in Baden, Switzerland. He holds a BS degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern University and PhD and MS degrees in petroleum engineering from Stanford. His research interests include theory of gas injection processes, multiphase flow processes in porous media, and well testing. Current research topics in reservoir engineering include analytical theory of three phase miscible flow, prediction of miscibility pressure and enrichment, improved fluid characterization for compositional simulation, analytical theory of two- and three-phase coning, effect of dispersion on oil recovery by WAG and slug injection. Past research topics also focused on improved interpretation of drill stem tests by considering pre-test pressures and temperature variations. In these areas he has published over 45 referred journal articles and proceedings papers and was also the editor for the SPE monograph on Practical Aspects of CO₂ Flooding. Dr. Johns received the SPE Ferguson medal in 1993 for his research on the combined condensing/vaporizing gas-drive process. He also received the Faculty Excellence award in 1997 and the Young Faculty award from The University of Texas at Austin in 2000. He is currently Executive Editor for SPE Reservoir Evaluation and Engineering journal.
	Larry W. Lake larry_lake@mail.utexas.edu Professor Lake's interests include enhanced oil recovery, reservoir engineering, reservoir characterization, geochemical modeling, and simulation.
	Quoc P. Nguyen quoc_p_nguyen@mail.utexas.edu Research interests include: fluid mobility control; heavy oil recovery using thermal and chemical approaches; and tar sand and oil shale.
	Gary A. Pope gpope@mail.utexas.edu Dr. Pope's research interests include enhanced oil recovery, the use of tracers for reservoir characterization and numerical reservoir simulation. His research on enhanced oil recovery over the past 32 years has included work on chemical flooding, polymer flooding, miscible flooding, steam flooding and in-situ combustion. The emphasis in this research is on the experimental investigation of how phase behavior, fluid properties and rock/fluid interactions affect these enhanced oil recovery processes and how to model these phenomena as well as how to use simulators to optimize, scale up and predict performance. Current research includes the development of a next generation chemical flooding simulator, the use of partitioning tracers for integrated reservoir characterization, the remediation of gas-condensate wells to improve productivity, three-phase relative permeability models, and the development of high-performance surfactants for enhanced oil recovery.
	Kamy Sepehrnoori kamys@mail.utexas.edu Professor Sepehrnoori is Project Director for the Joint Industry Project for Reservoir Simulation in the Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. His research and teaching primarily focus on computational methods. Presently, his research projects include development of a general purpose reservoir simulator for massively parallel computers and clusters of personal computers, distributed computing for reservoir simulation, simulation of enhanced oil recovery processes and modeling and simulation of naturally fractured reservoirs.
	Carlos Torres-Verdin cverdin@mail.utexas.edu Dr. Torres-Verdin's interest include: (a) borehole geophysics, (b) formation evaluation,(c) well logging, (d) integrated approaches to the interpretation of well-log measurementsand core data, including micro- and macro-scale physics, (e) nuclear magnetic resonance phenomena in porous media, (d) near-borehole phenomena, (e) Integration of well logs with time records of fluid production measurements, (f) integration of well logs with 3D seismic data and vertical seismic profiling, (g) integrated reservoir characterization, especially integration of 3D seismic data with well logs, core data, and time records of fluid production measurements, (h) in-situ permanent sensors, (i) automatic feedback control of hydrocarbon reservoir production, (j) numerical simulation of electromagnetic, elastic, and fluid-flow phenomena in porous media, (k) Inverse theory and nonlinear optimization, (l) signal and image processing, and (m) stochastic modeling and control. Dr. Torres-Verdin is director of a joint industry research consortium on the subject of formation evaluation. His research focus is on multi-disciplinary interpretation of rock physics measurement into multi-phase petrophysical variables. Dr. Torres-Verdin has published extensively in the areas of subsurface geophysics, inverse theory, and numerical simulation. Please see Dr. Torres-Verdin's personal web page for more information.
	Mary F. Wheeler mfw@ices.utexas.edu Dr. Wheeler's major research interests are the formulations and analysis of parallel algorithms for modeling multiphase, multicomponent flow and transport in porous media, including derivation of a posteriori error estimators. Under her direction, the Center for Subsurface Modeling at UT has developed the IPARS (Integrated Parallel Accurate Reservior Simulator) framework. This software has been extensively tested and has been shown to be comparable to existing industrial simulators. IPARS currently contains the following models: sequential and implicit (oil-water) two-phase; implicit black-oil (three phase, three component); two phase (air-water) implicit; explicit and implicit single phase; equation of state compositional; black-oil coupled to geomechanics and reactive transport coupled to multiphase flow models. An attractive feature of IPARS is that it allows for the coupling of different models in different subdomains and supports message passing parallel computations on structured multi-block meshes in two and three spatial dimensions.