Charles E. (Chuck) Fox is vice president of operations and technology at Kinder Morgan CO2 in Houston, Texas. He currently manages operations of the McElmo Dome CO2 source field and some 1,000 miles of CO2 pipelines. He is also responsible for his company’s oil and gas CO2 EOR operations, including the 5 billion-barrel Yates field, the 3 billion-barrel SACROC field, and the Snyder Gasoline Plant.
Fox has written on the practical aspects of CO2 flooding and has taught courses at the annual CO2 conferences held in Midland, Texas. He is a past chairman of the program committee of the SPE/DOE Fourteenth Symposium on Improved Oil Recovery. Fox holds an MS in petroleum engineering from Stanford University and a BS in mechanical engineering from Rice University.
J.M. (Jay) Avasthi is the executive vice president and director of geoservices at Avasthi & Associates, a worldwide petroleum consulting company headquartered in Houston, Texas. He has extensive experience in the oil and gas industry. He has authored or coauthored numerous technical publications, has taught several short courses, and conducted hands-on training workshops in his areas of expertise.
Jay Avasthi earned degrees in applied geology and mining engineering from the Indian School of Mines and an MS from the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Before joining Avasthi & Associates, he held senior-level research and supervisory positions at Chevron for several years. He is a long-standing member of SPE, a technical editor for the SPE Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering journal, and has served as the SPE Los Angeles Basin section director and program chairman.
Michael H. (Mike) Stein retired from BP in 2006 after 28 years of service, and is now a consultant specializing in enhanced oil recovery and integrated asset modeling. With BP, Stein was a team leader of the Integrated Asset Modeling Group in BP’s Technology Center in Houston. He also directed research on ways to apply integrated asset modeling to monitor corrosion and erosion in real time, and to couple integrated asset modeling with reservoir simulation. Stein holds three US patents, two in enhanced coalbed methane (ECBM) production and one in automatic waterflood history matching.
Stein holds a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Missouri, and an MS and PhD in chemical engineering from Purdue University.
S.M. (Sam) Avasthi, PE is president of Avasthi & Associates, a worldwide petroleum consulting company headquartered in Houston, Texas. He has extensive experience in oil and gas reservoir engineering and simulation, the revitalization of mature fields, EOR project design, as well as reservoir asset optimization and training. Sam Avasthi is an engineering alumnus of the Indian School of Mines, Imperial College of the University of London, and Texas A&M University. He earned his PhD in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University, and was a Research Fellow in chemical engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Before founding his own company, Avasthi held senior-level petroleum engineering and consulting positions with a major oil and gas company and an international oil and gas consulting company. He is a registered professional engineer in Texas, a senior member of SPE, and a technical editor for the SPE Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering journal.