Events

On Monday, November 16, the Graduate Seminar will be held at 3:00 pm. The speaker is Frank Male, PhD of the Center for Subsurface Energy and Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. Graduate students can find the Zoom link in their inboxes.

Title: Big data on a budget: Permian Basin oil recovery

Abstract: The Permian Basin has been producing oil for nearly a century, and approaches to maximizing recovery have changed enormously in that time. Today, we have more powerful approaches to data analytics and more data than ever before for analysis. In this talk, I will cover how to collect public data on oilfields in the Permian Basin and perform exploratory analysis. Then, using interpretable machine learning, I investigate criteria for enhanced oil recovery potential. In particular, I find that

1. Pilot area strongly correlates with profitable CO2 floods

2. Oil saturation does not strongly affect CO2 flood success

There are many avenues for future research utilizing and verifying these data analyses.

Bio: Frank Male is a research associate in the Center for Subsurface Energy and the Environment 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. He was a co-author of the 2013 Cozarelli Prize-winning paper “Gas production in the Barnett Shale follows a simple scaling theory.” Frank grew up on a ranch and tries to replicate that feeling by herding his two cats daily.

Archived Fall 2020 Seminars