Externship by Elio Dean
I wanted to give a major shout out to both the students and individuals/companies that volunteered their time this summer to help conduct a technical summer work project on compositional modeling of unconventional EOR here at Mines. As our industry has been going though these tough times, some companies were forced to retract their summer internships. What we learned in the 2015/2016 downturn was that students without an internship were not given the opportunity for a job interview, therefore our department created “externships” to help provide motivated students a technical project. This has been my third time conducting an externship with more than 20 students participating and has been one of the most enjoyable ones, because of the technical opportunity for unconventional EOR. Many of us in the department are passionate about unconventional EOR and believe the current downturn will put the attention on the reservoir engineering to finally crack the nut on increasing recoveries. This externship was an opportunity to initiate some fun conversations across the industry.
Mines, Surtek , CMG , and GeoMark volunteered time and resources to make this happen. Bill O’Brien and Jim Crompton provided industry insight and technical mentoring to these students. Companies such as Bonanza Creek , ExxonMobil , Samson Exploration , and other operators donated data to make this a real world project. A heartfelt thank you is sent out to each of these companies and individuals for remembering the students in these difficult times.
So here is what we did: 1. CMG provided software licensing and training on their fluid characterizations software (WinProp) and compositional simulator GEM. 2. GeoMark provided an excellent training on PVT characteristics of unconventional vs conventional reservoirs.
3. 20+ PVT reports from unconventional wells from all major US unconventional basins were given to the students. Each student digitized,
characterized, tuned the equation of state, and modeled at least 2 PVT reports.
4. Surtek provided training and templates on how to build a fractured well model, and how to simulate the Huff’n’Puff process with different
EOR agents.
5. Results were compiled providing unique insight on unconventional EOR opportunities in this tough environment.
If you are interested in learning more about this summer project please don’t hesitate to reach out to me and I’d be happy to answer any of your questions. Or if you have PVT data and want to model EOR technologies on your unconventional wells we have many students happy to help. Reach out to me ( edean@mines.edu ) for specific referrals.
We also had 5 graduate students from Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan) join the externship program. These students conducted the same program with the exception using conventional PVT reports and mechanistic modeling for polymer flooding using CMG software. Kazakhstan and NU have a big interested in EOR technologies and are working closely with Colorado School of Mines to find areas of collaboration. Con - tact Will Fleckenstein ( wflecken@mines.edu ) to work with one of those students or to discuss other collaboration opportunitis.
PE Thanksgiving
One of our favorite and longest run- ning traditions is the PE Thanksgiving Luncheon. It’s geat to have a time for UG and grad students to mingle and for students to chat casually with fac- ulty and staff.
PETROLEUM .MINES. EDU 15
https://petroleum.mines.edu/ mailto:edean@mines.edu mailto:wflecken@mines.edu