​From Oct 21st to 25th ANPERC’s Prof. Hussein Hoteit and Dr. Thomas Finkbeiner, together with ErSE’s Prof. Martin Mai, hosted Dr. Sherilyn Williams-Stroud for a 3-day short course entitled “Fractured, Fracturing, and Fracked Reservoirs”. 

The course focused on an integrated approach to the analysis of natural fractures related to geological strain and induced/triggered fracturing in response to reservoir production and hydraulic stimulation activities. Using a variety of  case study examples primarily from the oil and gas sector as well as hands-on exercises with industry-standard software such as Golder’s Fracman--which proves to be a very useful tool for some of ANPERC's research efforts--the course material further deepened the importance of integrated data analysis and modeling methodology in order to optimize engineering processes and workflows.

This software has already inspired ANPERC students and scientists to do more. According to PhD student Adrian Garcia: "The software is particularly useful for generating, manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing complex fracture network geometries that are informed by microseismic data."

"One thing I couldn't do before," says Weiwei Zhu, "is to upscale the fracture networks and calculate the permeability tensor. That's impressive to me."

ANPERC and KAUST wish to thank Dr. Williams-Stroud, who is Research Geologist at Illinois State Geological Survey and also CEO of Confractus Inc., for an engaging and thoughtful course for our faculty and students. Thanks for a great learning experience!

A special thanks also goes to Golder Associates Inc. for the generous donation of three permanent FracMan software academic licenses!