Heimo Anton

Heimo Anton is a petroleum engineer with over 30 years of experience in the oil and gas industry, working at international companies and joint ventures including RWE Dea and DEMINEX in UK, Norway, Egypt and Germany. During his career, he has been involved in the planning and supervision of all petroleum engineering activities during field development, the management of integrated development and reservoir studies, the design and negotiation of unit redetermination procedures and their coordination, the design of company guidelines for estimating and classifying reserves, the evaluation of corporate acquisition projects, and the performance of peer reviews of multidisciplinary projects. He served as a member of the Oil and Gas Reserves Committee (OGRC) of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE). He is a lecturer for reservoir management at the Mining University of Leoben, in Austria, and is also the author of several papers and publications in the field of reservoir engineering. He holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in petroleum engineering from the Mining University of Leoben.

Rod Batycky

Rod Batycky is the co-founder of Streamsim Technologies Inc., a company that develops commercial streamline-based reservoir simulators for the petroleum industry. Prior to forming Streamsim, he received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in petroleum engineering from Stanford University where he was also awarded the Cedrick K. Ferguson Medal for his outstanding SPE publication by an author under the age of 33. Previously, he worked as a reservoir engineer with Shell Canada, and obtained a B.Sc. in chemical engineering from the University of Calgary. He is currently involved in R&D and commercialisation of new technologies for streamline-based flow simulation, including large-scale reservoir modelling, assessing uncertainty, and assisted history matching.

Reidar Bratvold

Reidar Bratvold is the professor of petroleum investment & decision analysis at the University of Stavanger, Norway, where he is teaching and supervising graduate students doing research in decision analysis, uncertainty assessment, risk management, and investment analysis. Before joining the University of Stavanger, he was a professor and discipline head of petroleum engineering & management at the University of Adelaide, Australia, where he still retains a position as adjunct professor. He has also been the vice president of Landmark Graphics, general manager of Smedvig Technologies Software Solutions (now Roxar), senior scientist with IBM and a reservoir engineer with Statoil. He spent his early working years as a roughneck and roustabout in the North Sea. He is a member of the Stanford University Petroleum Investment Committee as well as a board member of several companies. Twice invited to serve as SPE Distinguished Lecturer, he is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events. He has published numerous papers on topics such as investment modelling, decision-making, stochastic reservoir modelling, fuzzy logic, and reservoir management. He is the co-author of two upcoming books: Decision- Making and Uncertainty Management and Analyzing and Managing Risky Investments. He holds a Ph.D. degree in petroleum engineering and a M.Sc. degree in mathematics, both from Stanford University, a M.Sc. degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Tulsa, and a B.Sc. degree from the University of Stavanger, Norway. He also has an extensive executive education from INSEAD, Stanford Graduate School of Business and the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences.

Mike Carlson

Mike Carlson founded Applied Reservoir Engineering & Evaluation, Ltd., a petroleum engineering consulting firm specialising in reservoir engineering, numerical simulation, and economic evaluations. He has more than 32 years of experience in the petroleum industry, working for such corporations as AMOCO Canada, Home Oil, Petro-Canada and Canadian Hunter. He has taught various short courses in the use of production and exploitation simulation software for such companies as Scientific Software-Intercomp and McDaniel & Associates Consultants Ltd. He has authored more than 20 different technical papers and is a member of SPE, APEGGA, the Canadian Well Logging Society, and the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists. He has served as technical program committee chairman for the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy & Petroleum (CIM), director of the National Board of the Petroleum Society of CIM, and was on the Industry Advisory Committee for the University of Regina Petroleum Engineering. He is the author of Practical Reservoir Simulation, (2003, PennWell Corp). Currently, he is actively involved in the development of a Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) project in north-eastern Alberta.

Daniel Clark-Lowes

Daniel Clark-Lowes has over 35 years of experience working in the oil and gas industry for companies including Shell and Charterhouse Petroleum, where he was chief geologist. He spent 10 years with Anglo Siberian, joining the company in 1993, soon afterwards becoming technical director. Previously, he was a director of Scott Pickford, the British-based petroleum consultancy, for eight years. With Scott Pickford, he was in charge of international prospectivity reports. His first degree was in natural sciences and geology at Cambridge University. He was later awarded a Ph.D. from Imperial College, London University, for work on the Palaeozoic clastics of Libya and Saudi Arabia. He has pursued his interest in Libyan geology ever since, with numerous publications. He has held a research fellowship at Imperial College and has been course director of the M.Sc. class on stratigraphy at Birkbeck College. For the last 8 years, he has pursued an active career running his own company, Nubian Consulting, dividing his time between an increasing portfolio of training courses and consultancy, including preparing and marketing non-exclusive reports on Libyan geology.

William M. Cobb

William M. Cobb is a petroleum engineering consultant who specialises in waterflooding, pressure transient analysis, and property management. Cobb has 40 years’ experience in the petroleum industry including research, staff, and district positions for ARCO Oil and Gas. He has hands-on experience in the design, implementation, surveillance, and management of waterfloods in various waterflooding areas of North America as well as Australia, Africa, the Middle East, the North Sea, South America, and Southeast Asia. He headed oil and gas operations for an independent oil and gas company. For more than 28 years, he directed a petroleum engineering and geological consulting firm in Dallas. He served on the petroleum engineering staff at Mississippi State, where he taught reservoir engineering courses. He has conducted numerous oneweek short curses on the subjects of Waterflooding, Pressure Transient Analysis, and Petroleum Economics. He has served on numerous committees for the SPE, including the Reservoir Engineering Program Committee, Publications Review Committee, Distinguished Author Series Committee, and Chairman of the Formation Evaluation Committee. He was the 2008 President SPEI and served as a member of the SPEI Board of Directors for seven and one-half years. Previously, he served as vice president of finance for SPEI. He also served as a distinguished lecturer for SPE members in 1995. In 1999, he was presented with the SPE Reservoir Engineer Award. He was recently named an Honorary Member of the SPE which is SPE’s highest award. He is currently an adjunct professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University. He has been a member of the National Petroleum Council since 2008. He received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Mississippi State University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in petroleum engineering.

John Collinson

John Collinson is a geologist with over 40 years of experience in stratigraphy and sedimentology, over half of it applied to the hydrocarbon industry. He brings to hydrocarbon-related problems a deep and wide experience of a wide range of clastic and carbonate depositional environments, stratigraphic ages and geographic locations. For the past 20, years he has applied this experience as a consultant to the hydrocarbon industry in the North Sea and worldwide on projects ranging from reservoir to basin wide scale. He has a wide and deep understanding of both clastic and carbonate depositional settings and reservoirs generally, based on extensive field and subsurface experience and has published in the areas of fluvial, deltaic, aeolian, glacial, carbonate and deepwater deposition. He has high-level descriptive and interpretative skills in logging core and integrating a wide spectrum of petrophysical log and petrographic data, in conjunction with facies and sequence stratigraphic analysis at scales from the basin to the small-scale field setting. He is also skilled in the integration of data to document basin-fill evolution or the building of detailed reservoir models and has developed innovative software for the probabilistic modelling and analysis of connectivity and related reservoir properties in channelised reservoir systems. He has vast experience in project co-ordination of a wide range of multi-disciplinary studies and is the author and editor of numerous multi-client and proprietary reports; author of numerous papers and of major sedimentological text books; editor of Sedimentology and of several multi-author volumes. He is also known as a presenter of courses to industry, in the field, laboratory and lecture room, including courses to single companies, to licence groups and as open courses (Sedimentary Research Associates; J.A.P.E.C. Course in Deep-water Depositional Environments). In addition to his consultant, author and editor roles, he is also an external examiner for numerous Ph.D. students in the UK and overseas and is currently an external examiner for M.Sc. in petroleum geology at Imperial College London, in addition to being an honorary professor at Keele University.

Mark Deakin

Mark Deakin is an experienced and innovative mainstream petrophysical consultant, author and enthusiastic tutor in petrophysics. He holds a Ph.D. in “Integrated Petrophysics” from London’s Imperial College, is an ex Amoco petrophysicist, and has 25 years of experience, including 12 as a lecturer, consultant and director of his own consulting company. He has performed over 40 detailed reservoir studies, primarily in Southeast Asia’s difficult carbonates and stacked ‘low-contrast-pay’ reservoirs and chooses to work frequently in operations to keep abreast of new LWD, coring and wireline technology. His holistic approach brings each field’s development uncertainties into sharp focus and then systematically reduces them by a cost-benefit ranked plan of action. Innovative integration and clear, practical recommendations typically result in improved simulation input and increased reserves, at low cost. Soon after his petrophysics Ph.D., he authored the first public petrophysical data integration course. He has continually evolved and chaired this and other courses, publicly and in-house. He is a long standing member of the SPWLA.

Dragutin Domitrović

Dragutin Domitrovic holds the position of field engineering & operations director at INA, Croatia. During his professional career of 18 years in the petroleum industry, he has held various engineering and management positions in PVT/ EOR/core analysis laboratories, reservoir simulation and engineering, and has continuously been involved in EOR-related activities of INA. Technical teams he currently manages are involved in various aspects of a CO2 flooding project being prepared for two mature oil fields in Croatia. He received his degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Zagreb, where he was also working as an assistant lecturer from 1996 – 2003, in addition to his industry career.

Jeffrey Dravis

Jeffrey Dravis is a carbonate geologist and owner of Dravis Geological Services, which conducts exploration and reservoir development projects in the U.S., Canada and overseas. He specialises in unravelling the controls on diagenesis and porosity evolution in carbonate sequences that aid in exploiting carbonate reservoirs. He applies innovative petrographic techniques to relate rock-based observations to well and seismic data, helping clients better define their subsurface plays and prospects. He has worked numerous carbonate projects in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and South America, as well as working Jurassic and Cretaceous sequences of the Gulf of Mexico, Devonian and Mississippian in western Canada, and Ordovician-Permian in west Texas and New Mexico. He is also the president of Dravis Interests, Inc., through which he conducts applied carbonate training seminars for the industry. Since 1987, he has presented over 200 in-house and field carbonate seminars for industry clients, including dozens of field seminars on Caicos Platform in the southern Bahamas. He received his B.Sc. (geology) from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, his M.Sc. (marine geology) from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and a Ph.D. (geology) from Rice University, Houston. He worked for Exxon Production Research Company, in Houston, for eight years, before becoming a full-time consultant over 25 years ago. Since 1987, he has been an adjunct professor at Rice, where he teaches part-time and mentors students.

Gioia Falcone

Gioia Falcone has recently been awarded the Endowed Chair of Professorship in Geothermal Energy at TU Clausthal. She is also adjunct associate professor in petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University, where she was formerly an assistant and then associate professor, Chevron Corporation Faculty Fellow and faculty member of the ODASES partnership. She holds a Laurea Summa Cum Laude in environmental-petroleum engineering from the University Sapienza of Rome, a M.Sc. degree in petroleum engineering from Imperial College London (with a Distinction on the final project) and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Imperial College London. Prior to joining Texas A&M, she worked with ENI-Agip, Enterprise Oil UK, Shell E&P UK and TOTAL E&P UK, covering both offshore and onshore assignments. She has served on the SPE Technical Program Committees for the ATCE, LACPEC and CO2 Storage and Utilization conferences. She is a technical editor and reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals such as Nuclear Engineering and Design, Experimental Thermal and Fluid Science, SPE Projects, Facilities & Construction Journal, SPE Journal, Journal of Canadian Petroleum Technology, and SPE Production & Operations. She was the recipient of the SPE Young Professional Paper Certificate at the 2008 and 2009 SPE ATCE Conferences in recognition of her paper contributions to the technical discipline of projects, facilities, and construction. She has co-authored over seventy scholarly articles and one US patent. Her book, Multiphase Flow Metering, 54 (Falcone, Hewitt and Alimonti) was published by Elsevier in 2009.

Darryl H. Fenwick

Darryl H. Fenwick is the project leader of the Streamsim/Stanford HM JIP, a joint industry project that fast tracks advanced history matching algorithms developed at Stanford for JIP industrial sponsors. He received his Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from Stanford University in 1997 and his masters and bachelors from Stanford University in 1993 and 1989, respectively. He is a technical editor for SPE Reservoir Evaluation and Engineering.

Rudolf K. Fruhwirth

Rudolf K. Fruhwirth is the founder of NGS – Neuro Genetic Solutions Ltd., providing artificial intelligence solutions to the oil and gas industry. He holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in petroleum engineering from the Mining University of Leoben, Austria. He has more than 20 years of experience as the leading geoscientist and field engineer in a major Austrian research company. He is author of numerous publications, and assistant professor for computational intelligence and computer tomography at the Mining University of Leoben. He developed “cVision,” the first fully automatic neural network tool and heads the research and development department with NGS.

Leonhard Ganzer

Leonhard J. Ganzer is director of the Institute of Petroleum Engineering at the Clausthal University of Technology in Germany where he teaches Reservoir Engineering and Simulation Technologies. Previously, he was professor of reservoir engineering at the Mining University of Leoben in Austria. His area of research includes reservoir simulation and enhanced oil and gas recovery. He is managing director of HOT Reservoir Solutions GmbH and has worked for the petroleum industry in the US and Europe for several petroleum consulting companies. He holds a Ph.D. in Reservoir Engineering and a M.Sc. in Petroleum Engineering from the Mining University of Leoben and the Colorado School of Mines, USA. He is an experienced instructor in academics and industry courses on various topics in reservoir engineering and simulation, author of numerous scientific papers and serves as technical editor for SPE.

Jorge Salgado Gomes

Jorge Salgado Gomes has 30 years’ experience in the industry with several companies (Selection Trust, BP Minerals, EDMA, PARTEX, QGPC, Hot Engineering, RC2 Group, and ADCO) and academia (The Petroleum Institute). He holds a M.Sc. in geology from Oporto University (Portugal), as well as M. Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in petroleum engineering from Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh). During the last 9 years, while working for ADCO in Abu Dhabi, he has worked as a geoscience coordinator, geoscience expert and team leader of a major onshore field, producing 290,000 BOPD. During his assignments, he has been involved in many field development studies integrating static and dynamic data. Currently, he is a PARTEX Chair Professor at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, where he teaches Reservoir Characterisation courses with lab sessions on rock typing & 3D static modelling. He is a member of SPE, AAPG, EAGE, SCA, and ESG. He is the co-author of a university textbook about the oil & gas industry, Upstream and Downstream, pub. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (ISBN 978-972-31-1228-3), and has published several papers in technical conferences.

Bob Harrison

Bob Harrison is co-founder and director of Soluzioni Idrocarburi s.r.l., a company that provides technical consultancy and in-house training courses for the petroleum industry. He received his M.Sc. degree in petroleum engineering from Imperial College and an executive MBA from Cranfield School of Management. He is an academic visitor at Imperial College having previously been external lecturer on production logging and petroleum economics. He has worked in the oil and gas industry since 1979, gaining broad technical and commercial experience around the world, with a strong reservoir engineering and petrophysics background. After many years with British Gas and Enterprise Oil, he became a freelance consultant advisor to many oil and gas companies around the world, in particular, start-ups and newly formed ventures. He specialises in prospect evaluation, due diligence and asset screening, including data rooms, volumetric audits, analytical reservoir modelling, production profile generation and scoping economics. He is an experienced analyst of well deliverability, field performance, open hole and cased hole logs and has spent a number of years in offshore well operations including logging, testing and completions. He is the editor and author of several textbooks, including the bestseller, Russian-Style Formation Evaluation. He is a member of the SPE Editorial Committee of the Journal of Petroleum Technology, and writes and reviews numerous articles and papers in the oil and gas industry.

Richard Heenan

Richard Heenan currently operates a drilling and completions consulting practice based in Calgary, Alberta. He has more than 30 years of experience in the upstream petroleum industry in a variety of technical and managerial positions. This includes supervision of both on and offshore operations in Canada and overseas. Job assignments have included field supervision of drilling and service rigs, testimony as an expert witness in well control, preparation of arctic offshore drilling and development scenarios, and US Department of Justice Anti-Trust presentations. He holds a bachelor of mechanical engineering degree from McGill University in Montreal and is a member of APEGGA, SPE and the Canadian Association of Drilling Engineers (CADE). He has published papers and articles through CADE and SPE, as well as several commercial publications.

Tim Herrett

Tim Herrett is the founder and owner of Tim Herrett Ltd., a company that provides consultancy services to the upstream oil industry. He holds a B.Sc. (honours) in geology from Portsmouth University, UK. He has been a wellsite / operations geologist for 25 years and has great expertise in wellsite data management. He is the author and presenter of renowned industry training courses worldwide on subjects including Petroleum Geology for Non Geologists, Wellsite Geology, Operations Geology, Formation Pressures, and Wellsite Data Management. He has worked for a number of operators including Exxon, Mobil, Deminex, Amerada Hess, Statoil, Fina and Conoco. He currently works for BP as a senior wellsite geologist and projects geologist, specialising in pressure evaluation on HTHP wells and also lectures part time in Wellsite / Operations Geology and Wellsite Data Management on the petroleum geoscience master’s degree at Manchester University. Previously, he provided major operations and wellsite support for ExxonMobil in Norway and Houston (USA) and has written operations and wellsite geology procedures manuals for ExxonMobil Exploration, Development and Production companies. He further designed and developed software for wellsite and office use which are now commercially used in the industry, and he held the position of technical director of Cambrian Consultants with responsibilities for training, computing and software products.

Todd Hoffman

Todd Hoffman is an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines where he teaches courses on Geostatistics, Fluid Properties and EOR. Prior to that, he was a reservoir engineering consultant to the oil and gas industry specialising in flow modelling and fractured reservoirs. Previously, he was a petroleum engineering professor at Montana Tech, where he taught courses on Reservoir Engineering, Characterisation, Flow Simulation and Thermal Recovery. He has over 12 years of combined experience in academia and industry. He has been a reservoir engineer for companies such as Anadarko and Chevron and has built and worked on reservoir models for more than 30 fields on six continents. He is especially interested in improved recovery for shale oil reservoirs and ensuring data consistency while history matching. He received his B.Sc. in petroleum engineering from Montana Tech and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from Stanford University.

John Keasberry

John Keasberry graduated in geology and geophysics at the University of Leiden. He joined the United Nations in Ethiopia in 1975, carrying out geophysical surveys for oil, gas, groundwater and minerals. He moved to Placid Oil in 1979 to work as a seismic interpreter and to McKinlay Smith in 1981 to work as a geoscientist. In 1983, he founded his first consultancy in London, carrying out interpretation and evaluation projects in the UK, Netherlands and Norway. In 1985, he joined Nedlloyd Energy as exploration manager, being responsible for Nedlloyd’s portfolio in the Netherlands, UK, Egypt, Ecuador and Indonesia. When Nedlloyd was sold to DSM in 1992, he became a consultant again. From 1997 to 2005, he was employed by Shell’s Learning Centre as a course director and lecturer. Today, his vast and versatile experience of more than 30 years in a broad field of geoscience aspects is put to use in his consulting partnership with his wife.

Wolfram Kleinitz

Wolfram Kleinitz holds a M.Sc. in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from the University of Clausthal. He recently retired from Gaz de France, where he was the head of the Production Chemistry Department of Gaz de France Production Exploration Deutschland GmbH, since 1992. He continues his profession as a consultant in production chemistry (CONPROCHEM). He joined Preussag Energie, now Gaz de France, in 1971 and worked as a chemical engineer before he became responsible for all chemical aspects in oil and gas production and storage (salt caverns as well as storages in porous media) in 1978. Amongst others, he focused his interests on water treatment and control, sulphate reducing bacteria, scale formation, organic precipitates, stimulation and injectivity of Produced Water Re-Injection (PWRI) projects. In 2004, he became responsible for all R&D activities in GDFPEG and GDF-DOP (Paris).

Leo Lourdes

Leo Lourdes is a certified corporate trainer and master practitioner in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). He holds a B.A. (honours) degree in design & brand management, in addition to having a diploma in graphic design. He has coached and mentored his clients in streamlining their communication and defining and implementing their success strategies and has facilitated international training in London, New York, Las Vegas, Dubai, Rome, Shanghai, Singapore, and Vienna. He has authored 52 soft skills courses and has experience in petroleum & gas, banking, media, entertainment, charity & service sectors. He is known for his insight when it comes to creating unique solutions to on-going problems for organisations. His ability to preserve what works and has stood the test of time, alongside embracing ideas that are forward looking and growth focused, makes him a useful consultant trainer to any company. His passion is in encouraging individuals and organisations to use both creativity and pragmatic thinking as part of their growth.

Tony Loy

Tony Loy received his B.Sc. degree from Liverpool University in 1979. He was employed as an exploration geologist working in Africa and Europe for several years. In 1983, upon completion of his master’s degree at Sheffield University, he was employed at the university’s geology department as a consultant biostratigrapher. During his time working at the University he completed his doctorate, working on it part-time whilst fully employed by the Industrial Palynology Unit, which he went on to manage after several years. In addition to his consultancy work, he was also involved in lecturing at both undergraduate and postgraduate level and also the mentoring of M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. In 1997, he formed his own geological consultancy offering stratigraphic, biostratigraphic and data management services as his main areas of expertise, and he has been actively involved with this service ever since. He has also written and presented scientific papers to international conferences, as well as being the author of several geological field guides. During his 30 years in the hydrocarbon industry, he has worked for many of the major players including Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Statoil and Elf, as well as many smaller companies. More recently, he has been providing tutoring and training services to the geoscientists of the national oil company of Venezuela, PDVSA.

John H. Martin

John Martin has been active as an independent reservoir development consultant for over 20 years. This includes responsibility for planning, coordination and technical management of major integrated field studies including equity determinations, both in expert and advisory roles. His worldwide project experience includes offshore and onshore in NW Europe, West and North Africa, the Gulf and South Asia. He has presented in-house and public training seminars in around 20 countries. He graduated with a first class honours degree in geology from Oxford University and obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He first worked as a reservoir geologist in the Production Geology Department of Shell Research Laboratories, specialising in the study of complex clastic reservoirs, including support for enhanced oil recovery projects. As principal geologist with International Petroleum Engineering Consultants Ltd in London, his responsibilities included reservoir geological evaluation, input to integrated field studies and the management of engineering projects. He has authored several papers concerning the integrated geological and engineering evaluation of complex reservoirs, and also held the post of senior lecturer in development geology at Imperial College, London.

Robert Mott

Robert Mott holds a M.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from London University. He has expertise in all aspects of reservoir simulation, including black oil, compositional and thermal simulation. His detailed knowledge of PVT analysis and equation of state modelling for petroleum reservoir fluids, and his specialist knowledge of gas condensate reservoir engineering issues, including phase behaviour, recovery mechanisms, relative permeability, well deliverability and numerical simulation, designated him to be a SPE Distinguished Lecturer for 2000-2001. Since 2000, he has been a consultant on gas condensate reservoir engineering, simulation and decision risk management. Previously, he has worked for AEA Technology as project manager in gas condensate reservoir engineering and where he also managed projects for UK government and operating companies covering reservoir simulation, PVT modelling, software development and decision risk management. He has lectured and presented several workshops on Reservoir Engineering and Reservoir Simulation. He is also an experienced developer of reservoir engineering software, including reservoir simulation and PVT modelling.

Roger L. Nutt

Roger L. Nutt is a petrophysical consultant. He has nearly 40 years of experience in the oil and gas industry; eight years with Schlumberger as a wireline engineer and manager; and much of the remainder with major oil companies as a senior petrophysicist and manager of formation evaluation. For the last ten years, he has been an active petrophysical consultant and an instructor. His extensive knowledge of open and cased hole log interpretation, reservoir monitoring and oilfield practice has been gained in North Africa, the US Gulf Coast, MidWest and Rocky Mountains, the Western Canada Basin, the North Sea, the Middle East and CIS. He is the author of several papers on cement bond logging, time lapse reservoir monitoring, and casing corrosion, and has made presentations to several technical conferences. He is a member of the Institute of Physics and is a chartered physicist. He holds a B.Sc. in physics (with geology and electrical engineering) from the Royal Victoria University of Manchester.

Jonathan Redfern

Jonathan Redfern obtained a B.Sc. from the University of London (Chelsea College) and a Ph.D. from the University of Bristol. He has more than 25 years of experience within the oil industry and academia. He is the professor of petroleum geoscience, and head of the Petroleum Geoscience and Engineering Department at the University of Manchester, where he teaches a number of master’s level courses, and leads the North Africa Research Group (NARG). This large research group is undertaking regional scale geological studies across North Africa - supported by a group of leading oil companies. Before returning to academia, he was a petroleum geologist with Fina and Amerada Hess for 12 years, working in the UK, North Africa (Libya) and S.E. Asia. He has experience of working on, and managing, both new ventures and operated license projects and undertook active research on a number of regional geology projects in North Africa and S.E. Asia. As well as teaching and supervising Ph.D. research projects, he undertakes consulting work for leading companies in the region, involving basin modelling, regional geological studies /fieldwork and petroleum system analysis. He has been teaching public and in-house courses for a number of years for HOT Engineering, academia and various select companies. He has published a number of papers on petroleum systems, basin modelling, North African regional geology and sedimentology. He is a fellow of the Geological Society (FGS), a member of the AAPG and also the PESGB, IAS, EAGE. He is on the editorial board of the AAPG Bulletin and the Journal of Petroleum Geology.

Jürgen H. Schön

Jürgen H. Schön is a consultant and is an honorary professor at the Mining University of Leoben. Previously, he was a senior geophysicist and scientific leader of the Geophysical Institute of the Joanneum Research (Leoben, Austria), held the chair for well logging and petrophysics at Bergakademie Freiberg (Germany, 1980-1991) and was a visiting professor at the Colorado School of Mines, in 1993. He published more than 80 technical papers and holds 2 US-patents; in 1996, he published his textbook, Physical Properties of Rocks - Fundamentals and Principles of Petrophysics (Handbook of Geophysical Exploration, vol. 18, Pergamon Press). He is a member of the SPWLA and EAGE. In 2005, he received the award for Distinguished Technical Achievement (SPWLA).

Frank Seidel

Frank Seidel has more than 28 years of oilfield experience and is the president of Seidel Technologies, LLC a drilling and completion project management company founded in 2009. He began his career with Amoco Production Company where he was employed for 12 years as a drilling engineer and rig supervisor. He then worked for Burlington Resources in various assignments a drilling engineer, drilling superintendent and drilling manager. He served in drilling management positions in Western Canada for 8 years at Burlington Resources and Canetic Resources, returning to the US in 2007 to work for El Paso E&P as an operations manager, Western Region. He is a co-author of the Air and Gas Drilling Manual, McGraw-Hill, 2001. He is a chemical engineering graduate from New Mexico State University, Las Cruses, New Mexico, U.S.A.

Janet Stevenson

Janet Stevenson is an experienced consultant, trainer and facilitator with a background gained from six years as a senior consultant for GBS Training Ltd and five years with SmithKline Beecham in Central HRD. She has a passion for developing people and helping them grow. She designs and delivers open and in-company courses, workshops, coaching, and one-to-one training. Her strengths include creativity, flexibility, a sense of humour and the ability to meet deadlines. She speaks fluent French and has gained great working experience in Europe as well as from abroad including countries like Kuwait, Mauritius, etc. She has also published various articles like “The Main Event,” which is about organising major conferences and events, published in Executive PA magazine, and “A Day in the Life of an E-learner,” published by Training Journal. Her on-going projects include open programmes for women (Springboard), Train the Trainer, Time Management, Stress Management, Minute Taking and Report Writing.

Jess Stiles

Jess H. Stiles is a consultant involved with reservoir engineering and management problems in major fields in the UK and the Norwegian sectors of the North Sea. He graduated from Texas A&M with high honours in petroleum engineering before joining Humble Oil Company’s East Texas Division. He transferred to Exxon’s overseas organisation in 1970, and held reservoir engineering positions in Libya and Malaysia. He moved to London in 1977 with Esso where he was involved with the evaluation, development and management of major North Sea fields, gaining a keen interest in all aspects of fluid displacement processes and reservoir characterisation, particularly in permeability distribution and relative permeabilities. When he left the company in 1992, he had reached the position of senior technical advisor, an executive position on Exxon’s professional ladder.

Roger Suthren

Roger Suthren obtained a B.Sc. in geology from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. from Keele University, UK. His Ph.D. and post-doctoral studies concerned the sedimentology and volcanology of Ordovician volcaniclastic sequences. He has 30 years of experience in university teaching and research, and has been a consultant for the petroleum industry, which included teaching short courses and petrographical projects on volcanic reservoir rocks. He is currently a senior lecturer in geology at the University of Derby, where he teaches undergraduate courses in sedimentology, stratigraphy, volcanology and global hazards. He has extensive field experience of modern and ancient volcanic terrains in Europe, North America and the Pacific. He has taught for over 20 years on M.Sc. courses in Petroleum Geoscience, and currently contributes to the postgraduate courses in Applied Petroleum Geoscience at Derby. He has published papers on various aspects of volcanology, sedimentology and geoscience education, and has fast experience in developing online resources for geoscience teaching. He also has a keen interest in geoscience education for the general public and frequently leads field trips and runs short courses for adult education groups and amateur geological societies. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of London, a member of the Petroleum Exploration Society of Great Britain, and of the Geological Society of America.

Gabor Takacs

Gabor Takacs is presently head of the Petroleum Engineering Department at the University of Miskolc, Hungary and holds M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in petroleum engineering from the same institution. Previously, he was acting director (2007-08) at the Petroleum Engineering Department at The Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, UAE. He has more than 30 years of teaching and consulting experience in the production engineering field. He taught as a visiting professor at Texas Tech University, USA and at the Mining University of Leoben, Austria. He was selected SPE Distinguished Lecturer, was Outstanding Technical Editor for the SPE journal “Production and Facilities,” (1992-2003), and chaired the Artificial Lift TIG (Technical Interest Group) of SPE (1997-2003). He is the author of several books on artificial lift technology; Modern Sucker-Rod Pumping (1993), Sucker-Rod Pumping Manual (2002), Gas Lift Manual (2005), all published by PennWell Books, USA. His latest contribution, Electrical Submersible Pumps Manual, was published in 2009 by Elsevier. He has more than 90 technical papers to his credit. He taught various short courses for many oil companies in Libya, Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, UAE, Romania, Malaysia and Austria; and is a well-known consultant and instructor on production engineering and artificial lift topics.

Marco Thiele

Marco Thiele is the president of StreamSim Technologies, Inc., a software company he co- founded with Dr. Rod Batycky and Prof. Martin Blunt specialising in reservoir simulation technology based on streamlines. Previously, he was an acting assistant professor at Stanford University teaching graduatelevel courses on Reservoir Simulation, Thermodynamics of Phase Behaviour, and Applied Mathematics in Reservoir Engineering. His research at Stanford focused on streamline-based flow simulation, uncertainty in reservoir forecasting, and integrated reservoir management. He received his Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from Stanford University in 1994 and his masters and bachelors from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989 and 1986, respectively. He was a keynote speaker at the 6th International Forum on Reservoir Simulation in 2002, recipient of the 1996 SPE Cedric K. Ferguson Medal, winner of the 1994 International SPE Student Paper Contest, and a 1991 distinguished SPE speaker, invited by the SPE Adriatic Section. He is a technical editor for the SPE Reservoir Evaluation and Engineering Journal.

Gerhard Thonhauser

Gerhard Thonhauser is the professor for drilling engineering at the Mining University of Leoben. He provides the petroleum industry with drilling data management and engineering services through Thonhauser Data Engineering (TDE). He holds a degree from both the Mining University of Leoben and the Colorado School of Mines and received his Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from the Mining University of Leoben. Prior to the foundation of TDE, he worked with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the CSIRO, Australia, in the development of drilling software solutions. He was involved in extended reach drilling projects in Northern Germany. Currently, he is involved in several research projects to improve learning and knowledge management in drilling organisations. He has published several papers on fluid dynamics and cuttings transport.

Juan J. Tovar

Juan J. Tovar is a founding member and director of IESL. A mechanical engineer from the UCV in Venezuela, he has worked for Schlumberger Dowell in Libya, UAE, Algeria, Norway and the UK in operations, technical and management positions for 10 years. While at Schlumberger, he returned to University in Edinburgh to receive his M.Sc. in petroleum engineering from Heriot-Watt, working on sand production and associated completion problems. He spent two years in Italy where he was the R&D and technical services manager for Italog, a subsidiary of the Geoservices group. In 1993, he returned to the UK to found IESL with Jeff Callander and implement joint ideas for innovation and technologies that were shared since their time in the field. He has participated in many projects particularly in the North Sea, Venezuela, Peru and West Africa for sand face completion design, sand control, gas storage and wellbore stability. From 2003 to 2006, he was the technical director of the US subsidiary of IESL based in Houston where he started the development of the market for the Americas. He returned to the UK to be the group operations director. He has published over 20 papers on completion technology, geomechanics, sand production prediction and wellbore stability, areas where he has extensive experience and continues to work regularly. He is the holder of 6 patents in well completion equipment and is the developer of 3 commercial courses in Well Completion, Perforating, and Sand Management, and has presented over 50 in-house courses worldwide. Since 1999, he has been an associate lecturer at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he has contributed to the development of the online master degree programs and lectures on Well Design and Completion Engineering subjects.

Curtis H. Whitson

Curtis H. Whitson is professor of petroleum engineering and applied geophysics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Petroleum Engineering and Applied Geophysics. He teaches courses on Petroleum Phase Behaviour, Well Performance, Enhanced Oil Recovery, Gas Reservoir Engineering, and Integrated-Model Optimisation. His areas of research include equations of state, heptanes-plus characterisation, gas condensate reservoirs, gas injection EOR petroleum streams management and liquid-loading gas well performance. He has co-authored the book Well Performance (2nd Ed. Prentice-Hall, 1991) and the Phase Behavior monograph volume 20 for the Society of Petroleum Engineers (2000). He consults extensively for the petroleum industry through PERA, a specialty consulting company he founded in 1988. He consults on ‘compositionally-sensitive reservoir processes’ for most major oil companies worldwide. He is involved in developing new-generation software that allows integrated-model optimisation of large-scale petroleum projects. He offers several industry courses on Advanced PVT and EOS Modelling, Miscible Gas Injection Processes, Gas Condensate Reservoir Engineering, Natural Gas Engineering, Well Performance, and Decline Curve Analysis. He has a B.Sc. in petroleum engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (now NTNU). He is an honorary member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), and has twice received the Cedric K. Fergusson Award and the Anthony F. Lucas Gold Medal (2011) from the SPE. He received the 2010 Excellence in Research Award from Statoil for his contributions to gasbased EOR and fluid characterisation.