Each of the reservoir engineers within TCA has advanced engineering degrees and a minimum of 25 years in the Petroleum Industry. These engineers have worked together as an effective team on many enhanced oil recovery projects during the last two decades, beginning at Shell Oil and Shell Development Companies. TCA projects in North and South America, Europe, and Australia have provided this team with experience in delivering engineering services on a worldwide basis.
Dr. Curtis A. Chase, Jr. (TCA)
While at Shell Development Company, Dr. Chase gained extensive
experience in
scaled physical modeling of oil recovery processes as well as reservoir
simulator development. He has developed all of TCA's in-house simulation
capabilities. The miscible flood simulator he and Dr. Todd developed is not
only used on a continuing basis by TCA in support of reservoir engineering
project work for various clients, but also has been used (purchased, leased or
run on a royalty basis) by a number of major oil companies including Exxon,
Mobil, Shell Canada, Cities Service, Conoco and Union. With ourselves and many
other companies constantly working with our miscible flood simulator, the
simulator's capabilities, together with our own experience in application has
continued to grow. It should be noted, however, that although this simulator
appears to have gained wide acceptance in the industry, we believe that it is
important that we look upon ourselves as reservoir engineers first, and
developers of simulation software second. We have developed the simulation
software, as necessary, to support our reservoir engineering practices.
Dr. Elmond L. Claridge (TCA)
Dr. Claridge has had a distinguished career spanning a period of
several decades, first, in various research departments of Shell Oil
and Royal Dutch Shell and, later, as a consultant to TCA and an
Associate Professor at the University of Houston, where he was the
Director of the Graduate Program in Petroleum Engineering. His
reputation for excellence in experimental work involving miscible
flooding and the physics and chemistry of fluid systems for enhanced
oil recovery is well known to many in the Petroleum Industry. Dr.
Claridge assisted in the description of the physics embodied in our
miscible flood simulator, and he has worked closely with us on numerous
field projects for TCA clients since the firm's inception. Dr. Claridge
is able to offer assistance in the design and interpretation of the
ofttimes very difficult laboratory experiments required to determine
data on phenomena such as waterblocking of oil from the CO2 solvent and
the impact of hysteresis in relative permeability and phase separation
(e.g. L1, L2, asphaltene) on in-situ mobility of the injected CO2. Dr.
Claridge is currently heavily involved in the investigation of foams
for mobility control in systems characterized by poor volumetric
conformance. Dr. Claridge has been recognized as a "Pioneer" in
enhanced oil recovery; receiving recognition at the 1988 SPE/DOE
Enhanced Oil Recovery Symposium in Tulsa.
Michael Prats (Prats & Assoc.)
Prats has been concerned with long-range oil supplies since 1952,
and with new techniques for developing energy resources such as oil
shale since 1959. Prats worked 40 years for Production Research and
Development in Reservoir Engineering while associated with Shell, using
experimental, theoretical, and numerical approaches. Areas of emphasis
included
Dr. Michael R. Todd (TCA)
Dr. Todd received the Society of Petroleum Engineer's Cedric K.
Ferguson Award
in 1973 for a paper which described a procedure which enables black oil
simulators to be used to model the behavior of unstable miscible
displacements. While Dr. Todd was at Shell Development Company and Intercomp
he was involved with the evaluation of enhanced oil recovery projects,
including thermal, carbon dioxide and micellar/polymer flooding. Since he has
been with TCA, he has been extensively involved in the formulation of the
miscible flood simulator, and in the design of CO2 and LPG fluid injection
projects for numerous clients. Dr. Todd has remained active in the SPE,
publishing some 20 technical papers. He has been an invited speaker at a
number of SPE functions, has served on the SPE Program Committees, and chaired
the 1984 SPE Forum on Miscible Flooding. Dr. Todd's principal efforts while
at TCA have been in the areas of prototype selection for evaluation of
enhanced oil recovery potential, reservoir description for simulation
modeling, selection of parameters required for simulation, diagnosis and
evaluation of simulation and pilot performance, and the application of
alternative scale-up procedures for evaluation of full-scale secondary and
enhanced oil recovery projects.