2013 SPE – Gulf Coast Section Reservoir Study Group Reservoir Technology Forum

Dr. Tom Blasingame is a Professor and is the holder of the Robert L. Whiting Professorship in the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station Texas.  He holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Texas A&M University — all in Petroleum Engineering.  In teaching and research activities Dr. Blasingame focuses on petrophysics, reservoir engineering, analysis/interpretation of well performance, and technical mathematics.

Dr. Blasingame's research efforts deal with topics in applied reservoir engineering, reservoir modeling, and production engineering.  Dr. Blasingame has made numerous contributions to the petroleum literature in well test analysis, analysis of production data, reservoir management, evaluation of low/ultra-low permeability reservoirs, and general reservoir engineering (e.g., hydrocarbon phase behavior, natural gas engineering, inflow performance relations, material balance methods, and field studies).  To date (March 2013), Dr. Blasingame has graduated 51 M.S. (thesis), 30 M.Eng. (report, non-thesis), and 10 Ph.D. students, and he has performed several major field studies involving geology, petrophysics, and engineering tasks.

Dr. Blasingame is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), the Society for Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG).  Dr. Blasingame is a Distinguished Member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (2000) and he is a recipient of the SPE Distinguished Service Award (2005), the SPE Uren Award (for technology contributions before age 45) (2006), the SPE Lucas Medal (SPE's preeminent technical award) (2012), and he has served as an SPE Distinguished Lecturer (2005-2006).  Dr. Blasingame has prepared over 120 technical articles; and he has chaired numerous technical committees and technical meetings.  Dr Blasingame also served as Assistant Department Head (Graduate Programs) for the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M from 1997 to 2003, and Dr. Blasingame has been recognized with several teaching and service awards from Texas A&M University.

John Lee is Professor of Petroleum Engineering and holder of the Cullen Distinguished University Chair at The University of Houston. John holds BS, MS and PhD degrees in chemical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

He worked for ExxonMobil early in his career and specializd in integrated reservoir studies. He later joined the Petroleum Engineering faculty at Texas A&M, and became Regents Professor of Petroleum Engineering. While at A&M, he also served as a consultant with S.A. Holditch & Associates, where he specialized in reservoir engineering aspects of unconventional gas resources. He joined the University of Houston faculty in September 2011.

He served as an Academic Engineering Fellow with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) in Washington during 2007-8, and was a principal architect of the modernized SEC rules for reporting oil and gas reserves.

John is the author of three textbooks published by SPE and has received numerous awards from SPE, including the Lucas Medal, the DeGolyer Distinguished Service Medal and Honorary Membership. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

Rakesh Rai has over 15 years of experience working with oilfield services and integrated E&P companies. He joined Object Reservoir’s Engineering Services division in 2003 which became part of Weatherford in 2012. Mr. Rai’s core work areas include reservoir modeling, reservoir simulation, production optimization and forecasting, economic analysis, sensitivity analysis, development scheme optimization, well test studies, and nodal system analysis. He has extensive experience with unconventional gas fields in the United States and South America. He has also worked on characterization of conventional onshore and offshore Gulf of Mexico reservoirs.

He has an M.S.E in petroleum engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He has worked in UT’s gas condensate group and was responsible for its gas condensate reservoir simulation. He has a B.E. in Petroleum Engineering from University of Pune, India.

Mehdi Matt Honarpour, is a Senior Reservoir Engineering Advisor at Hess.  He has contributed significantly to the formation evaluation of both conventional and unconventional formations, rock-fluid interrelation and integration, special core analysis, miscible CO₂ process and scale-up of multiphase flow properties.  Honarpour introduced the concept of simultaneous steady-state relative permeability, capillary pressure and electrical property measurement and modeling.  He also developed large scale apparatus for relative permeability measurement on long full-diameter cores. 

Honarpour was with Mobil E&P Technical Center, MEPTEC and ExxonMobil Upstream Research, URC as a Senior Engineering Advisor for 18 years. He was a Project Manager for Integrated Reservoir Characterization and Rock-Fluid Integration at IITRI, NIPER.  Prior to that, he was a Tenured Petroleum Engineering Professor at Montana Tech.

Honarpour is the recipient of the 2011 SPE International Formation Evaluation award.  He was the chairman of the SPE Special Series Committee and the review chair for the SPEREE Journal.    Honarpour was the 1988 Society of Core Analysts, SCA, president and was awarded SCA Life-Time Achievement award in 2000.  He has authored and coauthored more than 90 technical papers and three books in Reservoir Engineering, Reservoir Characterization and Relative Permeability.  

Honarpour earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Missouri at Rolla, all in Petroleum Engineering.  He is a registered Professional Engineer in Texas. 

Krunal Joshi is a reservoir engineer in the Office of Reserves at Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation. He is currently providing support to Oxy’s unconventional business units for reservoir characterization and production forecasting. He holds a BS and MS degree both in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station. His advisor at Texas A&M was Dr. John Lee, with whom he performed research on production forecasting in shale reservoirs.

Mr. Murchison joined the Energy Group at Raymond James & Associates in 2005.  Mr. Murchison has successfully completed over 75 capital markets transactions representing over $15 billion of value during his tenure at Raymond James and he has advised on over $5.5 billion of mergers and acquisitions. Prior to joining the Energy Group, he held financial analyst positions with Amegy Bank of Texas and BNP Paribas in their leverage finance groups.  Mr. Murchison holds both a B.A. degree in English with honors and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Rod Sidle currently is Reserves Manager for Sheridan Production Company, a privately funded oil and gas producer.  He previously worked for Shell Oil Company and Royal Dutch Shell for 35 years before retiring in July 2009. Rod’s experience is primarily in reservoir engineering and economics with a focus on reserves estimation.  Rod is a member of SPE and SPEE, serving SPE as a Distinguished Lecturer and as a member of the Oil and Gas Reserves Committee.  He is currently a member of the SPEE Board of Directors. Since retiring from Shell, Rod has been a lecturer at Texas A&M University in the Petroleum Engineering Department on project evaluation and a Director of Reserves at Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation.

Ellen Coopersmith has a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, and is the Founder and President of Decision Frameworks, L.P., a consulting, training and software practice focused on building decision capability in the energy industry. She has published speaker on decision making and decision analysis implementation at domestic and international forums for the past 16 years.  Prior to forming Decision Frameworks, Ms. Coopersmith worked at Conoco, Inc. 16 years, the last five of which, were focused on leading one of the industry’s most successful implementations of decision analysis and improved decision making.

Joe Lynch is responsible for the activities of SPT Group's Reservoir Optimization division in North & South America.  SPT Group was acquired by Schlumberger in 2012.

Interests include understanding the impact of the reservoir architecture on fluid flow, and the use of optimizers to maximize reservoir performance.

Joe has a geology degree and an MBA from Nottingham & Warwick Universities in England.  He has worked as a development and operations geologist with various oil companies based in London, principally dealing with North Sea reservoirs and prospects. In the early 1990's he worked with a start-up venture investigating opportunities in the Russian oil & gas industry.  Since coming to the USA in 1999 he has been working with both static and dynamic modeling.  This includes their integration and the use of optimization and experimental design techniques to improve results.

(Outside of work he is an avid and loyal supporter of Chelsea Football Club).

Dr. Sébastien Matringe is currently the leader of QRI’s Innovation Group, a team focused on developing new quantitative reservoir management technologies.

Prior to joining QRI, Dr. Sebastien Matringe was a reservoir engineer with Chevron, where he worked on several green and brown field development projects in Angola, Iraq, Nigeria, and the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait Partitioned Zone. Prior to being an applied reservoir engineer for Chevron, he was a researcher in reservoir simulation technologies specialized in Applied Mathematics. His research work was performed in the R&D teams of Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, as well as Stanford, MIT and UC Berkeley.

Dr. Matringe holds a diplôme d’ingénieur in Mechanical Engineering from ENSEEIHT, France and an MSc and PhD in Petroleum Engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. David Castiñeira is currently the associate leader of QRI’s Innovation Group, a team focused on developing new quantitative reservoir management technologies.

He previously was a reservoir engineer with Shell International Exploration and Production Inc., where he worked on developing and applying new quantitative analytical methods for smart reservoir management. This included new approaches for data integration, well placement and production maximization.

Dr. Castiñeira holds a BSc from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and an MSc and PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. 

Mr. O’Brien was recently named Director of Portfolio & Reserves Administration for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation where his team provides portfolio modeling support to the company’s executive committee. Since joining Anadarko in late 2000, Mr. O’Brien has held several key positions within the company’s exploration group, including as General Manager of Engineering and Negotiations.  As such, Mr. O’Brien was responsible for the economic and commercial evaluation of opportunities within Anadarko’s global exploration portfolio. Prior to joining Anadarko, he worked for Atlantic Richfield Corporation where he gained valuable experience in the evaluation and development of oil and natural gas properties throughout the Gulf Coast Region. Mr. O’Brien has more than 28 years of energy industry experience. He graduated from Texas A&M University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Petroleum Engineering.

Mr. Bretches has more than 20 years of experience in the oil and natural gas industry. He began his career in 1988 serving in drilling and operations engineering roles with ARCO Oil and Gas Company before moving to the marketing side of the business with Vastar Resources in 1995. He came to Anadarko in 2000 holding positions of increased responsibility within the marketing and minerals departments and led the group from 2007-2010. Mr. Bretches currently serves as vice president, Exploration and Production (E&P) Business Services & Minerals and is responsible for overseeing the company's land, technology, supply chain management, and EHS functions, as well as its hard minerals properties that include non-operated joint
ventures and royalty arrangements in several coal, trona and industrial mineral mines located in the Rocky Mountains where Anadarko owns most of its fee mineral rights. Mr. Bretches holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Petroleum Engineering from Texas A&M University and an MBA degree from the University of Texas. He serves on the Boards of Directors for Member Source Credit Union, Center for Hearing and Speech, and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. He also chairs the Coordinating Subcommittee of the National Petroleum Council's Study on North American Resource Development.

Jeffrey Wilson is a Managing Senior Vice President and member of the Board of Directors at Ryder Scott Company.  He is a registered professional engineer with the state of Texas, and has over 20 years of experience as a reservoir engineer.  Mr. Wilson holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Houston.  He worked for Exxon for seven years prior to joining Ryder Scott.   Mr. Wilson joined Ryder Scott in 1998, and has worked on hundreds of domestic and international projects. He serves as a member of the SPE Oil & Gas Reserves Committee.

Mr. Daniels joined Anadarko in 1985 and assumed his current position in July 2012. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President, Worldwide Exploration, beginning in December 2006 and Senior Vice President, Exploration and Production beginning May 2004. Prior to that, he served as Vice President, Canada beginning July 2001. Mr. Daniels has also held key positions within Anadarko's exploration group, including Geologic Supervisor for Algeria, Manager of Geology for Algeria Exploration, Project Manager of the Ourhoud Development Project in Algeria, and Manager of U.S. Onshore Exploration.

Mr. Daniels holds a Master of Science degree in petroleum geology from the Colorado School of Mines and a bachelor's degree in economics from The Colorado College. He also is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program.

Mr. Daniels serves on the Board of Directors of the Cerebral Palsy Research Foundation and Junior Achievement of Southeast Texas. He is a Trustee of the American Geological Institute Foundation.