Events

Speaker: Dr. Tadeusz Patzek, Director of the Ali I Al‐Naimi Petroleum Engineering Research Center and Professor of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Title of Seminar: "Gas production from shales: Revisiting nearly a decade of predictions"

Abstract: I will present our statistics- and physics-based predictions of gas production from shale plays in the US. In particular, I will discuss a robust statistical analysis of cumulative gas production from 10,481 wells in six major gas-producing counties in the Barnett shale. To analyze by county the annual well cohorts, I employ a three-parameter generalized extreme value distribution. By adjusting the producible gas in place and pressure interference times, I then fit each statistical P50 well prototype with a physics-based scaling curve that also accounts for late-time external gas inflow. Having predicted that the currently active wells will produce 22 Tscf in 2030, I go on to estimate the numbers of future wells in each county necessary to achieve 40 Tscf of cumulative gas production or to maintain current production level to reach 27 Tscf. I conclude that some of the older predictions of EUR in the Barnett were too optimistic.

Biography: Currently, Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek is Director of the Ali I Al‐Naimi Petroleum Engineering Research Center and Professor of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Until December 2014, he was the Lois K. and Richard D. Folger Leadership Professor and Chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin. He also held the Cockrell Family Regents Chair #11. Between 1990 and 2008, he was a Professor of Geoengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Berkeley, he was a Senior Reservoir Engineer at Shell Western E&P in Bakersfield, CA (1989‐1990), and a Senior Research Scientist at the venerable Shell Development Bellaire Research Center (BRC) in Houston, TX. (1983‐1989).

Patzek is also a Presidential Full Professor in Poland (highest honor) and a Distinguished Member of the SPE. By education, he is a chemical process engineer and a physicist trained in catalysis and computational fluid mechanics. In 1983, at BRC, Professors Larry Lake and Gary Pope introduced Patzek to petroleum engineering, and his life was never the same.

Patzek has engaged in the studies of complex systems, focusing on the human factors in ultra‐ deepwater offshore operations. He briefed Congress on the BP Deepwater Horizon well disaster in the Gulf, and was a frequent guest on NPR, ABC, BBC, CNN, and CBS programs. In January 2011, Patzek became a member of the Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee for the Department of Interior's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE). He co‐ wrote a popular book with a famous historian, Joseph Tainter, "Drilling Down: The Gulf Debacle and our Energy Dilemma."

In 2014, Patzek and his colleagues, Prof. Michael Marder and Mr. Frank Male, received the Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences for the best paper in engineering in 2013, "Gas production in the Barnett Shale obeys a simple scaling law."

For the last 7 years, Patzek has maintained a blog about the environment, ecology, energy, complexity and human activities with 350,000 unique readers.
Patzek coauthored some 300 papers and reports, and wrote five other books, one of which is submitted for publication. His citation index is here.