Mission
Bring together industry, academia, private R&D consultants, and students to collaborate to provide technical solutions to reservoir problems of timely interest.
The Center
The Center was established in the academic year of 2003-2004. A non-restricted grant of $100,000 per year for three years from the Marathon Oil Company Foundation provided the initial funding, which was extended for another three years. Since inception, the Center has received over $1,600,000 funding from domestic and international oil companies. Pending projects that will be approved by Fall 2007 will increase the centers funding to over 3 million dollars. These included Repsol YPF (Argentina), Aramco (Saudi Arabia), Marathon Oil (USA), Westport Resources (Kerr-McGee/Anadarko), and PEMEX (Petroleos Mexicanos, Mexico). New memberships are pending formalities. The Center has already completed several industry projects and a number of new projects are in progress. The First Annual Meeting of the Center was held in late April, 2004. The representatives of several oil, service, and consulting companies were in attendance.
Team
The Center is all about teamwork and our short experience clearly indicates that it is doable. CSM and Petroleum Engineering faculty members (Dr. Hossein Kazemi, Dr. Erdal Ozkan, Dr. Jennifer Miskimins), outside consultants, company representatives, and many students have been involved in the research activities of the Center. On the average 12-15 graduate students are affiliated with the center each semester. Eight MS and four PhD students have completed their research in the Center. Currently 10 PhD students and 3 MS students are completing their studies in the Center.
Research
The current research projects cover a wide spectrum of reservoir studies with emphasis on field applications. Company supported research projects include, reservoir characterization, production data analysis, and reservoir engineering evaluation to improve production, infill drilling to increase recovery, flow modeling based on a discrete fractured network (DFN) model and pressure-transient data, and improved physical modeling of fractured reservoirs. The funding raised by the Center is also used to support highly technical and most up-to-date research projects conducted by the students under faculty supervision. These projects lead to the development of new technologies, models, and reservoir engineering tools. Some of the examples of the exciting research projects are the dual-mesh computing to capture reservoir heterogeneity, hybrid numericalanalytical model of a hydraulic fracture intercepted by a horizontal well, and new pressure-transient models for naturally fractured reservoirs containing multiple fracture sets.
