This week at the Energy Symposium, Dr. Frank Male, postdoctoral fellow at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, will present on the technology progress and physics constraints around tight oil production.
Speaker bio: Frank Male is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a PhD in Physics from UT and bachelor’s degrees in physics and political science from Kansas State University. Frank and his coauthors received the 2013 Cozzarelli Prize for their paper, “Gas production in the Barnett Shale obeys a simple scaling theory.”
Abstract: In the last two decades, tight oil production has revolutionized the US and world energy landscapes. This remarkable transformation has been the result of the rapid technological progress around hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and the discovery of large oil deposits accessible through this technology. Fracking has been so successful so quickly that its application has outrun the physical understanding around the formation of hydraulic fractures and flow pathways for oil around these wells. In this talk, I will address some of the physical constraints around intensifying hydraulic fractures and highlight a few areas where progress can still be made.
The UT Energy Symposium will meet every Thursday during the fall 2019 semester.