October 2011 Newsletter - petroleum engineering colorado school ...

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FACULTY LETTERSEUSTES CONT.the subject matter was clearly on the Macondo accident andwhat that means to the industry and to us individually. Ialso acknowledge the efforts of the Denver Chapter of theAADE. Besides scholarships, they have donated manypieces of equipment such as scanners, video projectors, mudkits, and repairs. And this year, even more.Our fund raising efforts for the upgraded drilling simulatorare ongoing. The Denver SPE chapter has donated $25,000and the Denver AADE Chapter has donated $15,000 withanother $15,000 from National. Wow! In addition, we aresending out requests for more funding not only to get theupgrade but also to maintain what we will have. If you oryour company wishes to contribute, please send your giftsto Colorado School of Mines Foundation, PO Box 4005,Golden, CO 80401-0005 or contact us.In a similar vein, with the support of Dr. Will Fleckensteinand the Tech Fee Committee, we will soon have threeportable well control simulators, identical to those used bywell control schools around the world. This will give thestudents many more opportunities to practice where theonly thing we can hurt are egos.In other news, I have been named the UndergraduateCoordinator for the upcoming ABET accreditation cycle in2012. For us to have a successful outcome (six more years ofaccreditation), we will need to document outcomes. We havebeen doing a good job here on campus. However, it is thealumni that ultimately show our success. We need to surveyour alumni with certain questions to highlight how well (ornot) we prepare you for your careers. You can find the onlinesurvey at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/H9X3RQC.Thank you in advance for your responses. We will need thiscompleted by December 31st.I do have a great job. This is a fun place to work. Ourfaculty and staff team work well together. The studentsare the best and the alumni are wonderful. My health isimproving with every year. I have a fantastic wife and twowonderful children. We lost our beloved Golden Retrieverlast year to leukemia; but, we now have a six month oldGerman Shepherd that can “woof” in three languages:German, English, and Dog. I will continue to be visited byyou and visiting you, maybe on field session or a conferenceor wherever our paths may cross. Until then, stay safe. Seeyou in Denver at the ATCE!WILL FLECKENSTEIN - BP ADJUNCT PROFESSORGreetings from Golden.This year BP againsupported my positionas an adjunct, and I thankthem for their support.This last year I taughtan interdisciplinarygraduate class focusedon shale reservoirswith Dr. Tom Davisfrom Geophysics andDr. John Curtis fromGeology. There wastremendous interestfrom the students,and industry was veryhelpful for providingspecialized speakersand case histories aboutthis quick changingWill, somewhere in the Middle Easttopic. I also taughtgraduate classes inDrilling and Workover Operations, which were taught in theevening to encourage industry participants to attend.I traveled to the SPE Conference last year in Florence. Italywas full of friendly and interesting people, which was greatsince I do not speak a word of Italian. It was impressive tosee the works of Michelangelo one minute and a paper onhydraulic fracturing the next. It also gave me an appreciationof someone trying to bring large scale hydraulic fracturingoperations to the countryside in Europe, and it really gaveme pause trying to imagine maneuvering frac equipmentand build infrastructure through the European countrysideand on the smaller roads, once you left the main highways. Ialso traveled to consult on a deepwater project in the EasternMediterranean, and helped an offshore operator fight forreasonable regulations in the wake of Macondo.My research efforts yielded a novel technique, which Minesis seeking patent protection for, with a Provisional PatentApplication filed with the Patent Office titled “METHODAND APPARATUS FOR ACCESSING A TUBULARANNULUS OF A WELLBORE”. Mines decided the bestway to commercialize this invention was through a startup, and with the help of the Boulder Innovation Center(BIC), FracOptimal LLC was born. BIC is a non-profit thatwas established in Boulder to help incubate startups fromColorado university research, and Mines has entered intoa relationship with them to do the same with our research.6
FACULTY LETTERSFLECKENSTEIN CONT.The participants in the BIC brings the tools needed to movea startup forward, including corporate legal assistance inpreparing the contracts and agreements involved in startingthe company, including the formulation of term sheets, nondisclosureagreements etc. Through many meetings withoperators involved in multi-stage fracturing in horizontalwells, we narrowed the focus of the technology to improvethe current method of diversion in horizontal wells. Currenttechnology can reach about 40 hydraulic frac stages in ahorizontal well, FracOptimal’s technology can double ortriple that number of stages, and improve the efficiency ofthe process while doing that. There are other applicationsfor the patented technology, such as ultra-short horizontalsidetracks, but what appears to hold the biggest interest forpotential investors is the multi-stage fracturing applications.Any parties interested in participating in FracOptimal,please contact Dr. Will Vaughan wvaughan@mines.edu atthe CSM Technology Transfer Office, or myself atwflecken@mines.edu .I hope everyone has had a wonderful year and look forwardto seeing many of you at the CSM Alumni Reception at theSPE ATCE in Denver this fall.TODD HOFFMAN“matches” the greatest good for the greatest number, andyou are contractually obligated to go where you matched.So when the dust settled on my normal interview processand I was offered the faculty position last February, westill had to wait another month to see if Holly “matched”a program in Denver. She did, and now she is working atSt. Anthony North – her first choice. Often it is difficultto make dual careers succeed, but fortunately for us, it isworking out well.Todd and Holly relaxing in HawaiiIt is amazing how sometimes the stars line up just right andyour life changes quickly and significantly. Just over a yearago, I sent an email to Ramona. I was coming to Keystone,CO for an SPE workshop on the Bakken and wanted to knowif I could stop by to talk to her about the possibility of someadjunct teaching opportunities for the fall of 2011. Ramonawas traveling when I came to town (surprise, surprise), sowe didn’t get to meet, but she did let me know that theywere posting a position for a new faculty. Well… long storyshort, here I am. :-)Ok, it wasn’t that easy, but mainly because my wife, Holly,was finishing med school and applying to residencies. Forthose of you lucky enough not to know how residencyapplications work, let me fill you in (it is different thanany application process I know). The first part is normal;you apply to programs and get interviews at some. Afteryou have finished all of your interviews, you rank theprograms from 1 to whatever AND the residencies rankall the applicants from 1 to whatever. Still with me? Nowthe weird part. The rankings from all the applicants and allthe programs are thrown into a big supercomputer, and itNow that I am here, let me give you my quick background.I grew up on a cattle ranch in Idaho and went to collegein Montana. Although I had never seen an oil well beforeor even knew much about the industry, I kind of fell intopetroleum engineering – and loved it. After my BS, Iworked in Houston for Anadarko. The job was great, butHouston and I didn’t fit. By then, I had started to considerbeing a professor, so we decided to head to California whereI did petroleum engineering graduate work at Stanford. Ireceived my MS in 2002 and my PhD in 2005, and I wentback to Montana Tech to teach. After three years, we movedto Seattle where Holly went to med school, and I worked asa consultant – first independently, then for the last year anda half with Golder Associates. Consulting was convenientwhile Holly was going to school, but I was really lookingforward to getting back to the academic world.I am teaching an EOR graduate level class this fall andPetroleum Geostatistics next spring (and I might try tohelp out Senior Design – by far my favorite class to teachwhen I was at M. Tech). I am doing some research onrepresenting complex hydraulic fractures and improvingreservoir modeling and history matching, but currentlythe main focus of my research is on gas injection into shaleoil reservoirs such as the Bakken and Niobrara. Primary7
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