Mission
Bring together industry, academia, private R&D consultants, and students to collaborate on technical solutions for petroleum 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 $6 million in funding from domestic and international oil companies. These included Repsol YPF (Argentina), Aramco (Saudi Arabia), Marathon Oil (USA), Department of Energy, Petro China, and PEMEX (Petroleos Mexicanos, Mexico).
Team
The Center is all about teamwork. CSM and Petroleum Engineering faculty members (Dr. Hossein Kazemi, Dr. Erdal Ozkan, Dr. Yu-Shu Wu, and Dr. Xiaolong Yin) research associates, research post-docs, outside consultants, company representatives, and many students have been involved in the research activities of the Center. On the average 15-20 graduate students are affiliated with the center each semester. Twelve MS and seven PhD students have completed their research in the Center in the last five years and several will be graduating shortly. Currently 20 PhD students and 4 MS students are completing their studies at 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 numerical analytical model of a hydraulic fracture intercepted by a horizontal well, and new pressure-transient models for naturally fractured reservoirs containing multiple fracture sets.
