Leveraging Analytics to Improve Drilling Performance and Safety: The Experience of ‘Shell’ and ‘CoVar’

Brian Tarr is a Senior Well Engineer at Shell based in Houston, Texas. His long career has included assignments in both drilling and completion operations and he has managed several significant technology projects related to well construction process safety, including the first surface BOP implementation for a deepwater subsea develop (offshore Brazil) and the design and construction of compact, modular, subsea capping stacks (for deployment in the North Sea and offshore S.E. Asia). 

Mr. Tarr has previously served as both a review committee chairman and a technical editor for the SPE Drilling and Completion magazine. He has also been active in both IADC and API well control related committees, including contributing to the 2nd edition of the IADC Deepwater Well Control Guidelines and to API RP 96, Deepwater Well Design and Construction.

He has a Master of Petroleum Engineering degree from Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh Scotland, and is a registered professional engineer in Texas.

Prior to founding CoVar, Mark was Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of NIITEK, Inc., a company dedicated to saving warfighter lives through the development and manufacture of its proprietary ground penetrating radar sensor systems. Mark was responsible for technology and product development from the inception of the company, through the initial deployment of its first system, to aggregate sales in excess of $250M. He holds six patents, and has presented as an invited speaker at conferences on counter-IED and sensing technologies. Mark has a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the College of William and Mary and a Master of Business Administration from the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.  Mark’s vision for CoVar is to create world-changing products; foster an environment that rewards ingenuity and innovation as well as delivery and accountability; and solve real-world problems by combining state-of-the-art technology with common-sense practicality.