Events

Dr. Todd Hoffman, Assistant Professor in the Petroleum Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines, will give a talk entitled "Enhanced Recovery for Unconventional Oil Plays: How Might We Do It?" as part of the Claude R. Hocott Graduate Seminar Series.

Abstract: Unconventional oil (aka liquid-rich source-rock) reservoirs such as Bakken, Niobrara, and Eagle Ford have become bright spot in domestic oil production. Since the development of the Elm Coulee field in Montana started in 2000, there have been thousands of wells drilled and hundreds of millions of barrels of oil produced. While there has been tremendous success particularly with horizontal drilling and multistage hydraulic fracturing, primary recovery factors in these types of reservoirs remains low (~5% - 10%). There remains hundreds of billions of barrels of oil yet to be recovered. The remaining resource in these formations will require improved recovery techniques, which implies some type of fluid injection. This talk explores what the options might be, and along with that, discusses some of the work that has been completed in this area, and research that is ongoing at universities, research centers and even within companies. Come see how we might produce our next 200 billion barrels of oil.

Bio: Todd Hoffman is an Assistant Professor in the Petroleum Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines.  He teaches classes on EOR, geostatistics and reservoir engineering. His research involves improved recovery for shale oil reservoirs, fracture reservoir modeling and ensuring data consistency while history matching. Before joining CSM, Todd was a senior reservoir engineer for Golder Associates in the FracMan group. He was also an assistant professor at Montana Tech and has been a reservoir engineer for companies such as Anadarko and Chevron.   He is active in SPE most recently as the Pacific Northwest Section president. He is a member of the Order of Engineers and a licensed professional engineer.  Todd received his B.S. in petroleum engineering from Montana Tech and his M.S. and his Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from Stanford University.