Topic: What are the select challenges in the sector of upstream and solutions in development – presented by Aramco Boston Research Center.
Time:
11:00 AM – 12:20 PM, Friday, Nov 9th, 2018
Schedule:
11:00 – 12:20 PM
11:00 AM – 11:20 AM Presentation by Martin Poitzsch, Ph.D.
11:20 PM – 11: 25 PM Q&A
11:25 PM – 11:45 AM Presentation by Abishek Kashinath, PhD.
11:45 AM – 11:50 AM Q&A
11:50 AM – 12:30 AM Lunch
Where:
Aramco Research Center – Boston, 400 Technology Square, Suite 300 Cambridge, MA 02139
Capacity:
30
Speaker:
Martin E. Poitzsch, Ph.D., Technology Leader, Aramco Research Center – Boston
Abishek Kashinath, PhD., Petroleum Engineer, Aramco Research Center – Boston
Abstract:
The Oil & Gas industry is currently at the forefront developing a large number of advanced technologies. Innovative approaches and solutions to challenges facing the industry allow significant improvements in productivity, efficiency and safety. Many companies depend on continuous improvement and innovation to produce energy. They heavily invest in developing technologies within their own research & development centers, as well as in collaboration with innovators from various fields at universities, startups and with companies from other industries. This event will introduce the approach Aramco is taking to develop technologies for challenges in Upstream sector of the Oil and Gas industry at their research center in Boston.
Speakers:
Martin Poitzsch holds an A.B. from Washington University (St. Louis) and a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University. After Harvard, he was an NRC Post Doc in the group of 2012 Physics Nobel Laureate David Wineland at NIST in Boulder, CO, From 1994 through 2004, Martin held a range of R & D and management positions in Schlumberger Oilfield Services, starting in “Logging While Drilling” Engineering in Houston. From 1996 to 2001, he led the NMR While Drilling product development team and then the Magnetic Resonance (both product engineering and manufacturing) department in Houston. From 2002 to 2004, he was the Wireline VP – Product Development based in Paris and Houston. From 2004 through 2013 he was the Research Director for Sensor Physics at Schlumberger-Doll Research, leading efforts on a wide range of physics-based sensing technologies being evaluated for possible exploitation as geophysical/petrophysical reservoir probes. His work also involved extensive collaboration with Schlumberger engineering centers and with external partners in universities, government labs, and other companies. In 2013-14 he returned to Houston to serve as Completions Sensing Architect for the oil industry’s most advanced integrated SmartWell completions project implemented in collaboration with Saudi Aramco. In late 2014, Martin moved to Aramco’s new US Research Center in Cambridge, MA, where he is leading a team of nano-materials scientists and chemists developing a new class of injectable and mobile reservoir “NanoProbes” to change the game on the illumination, monitoring, and increased recovery of large oil reservoirs.
Abishek Kashinath graduated with a B.Tech., M.Tech. in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from I.I.T. Madras and holds a Ph.D. from MIT specializing in Computational Materials Science. Upon graduation in 2013, he joined the Computational Modeling Technology team at Aramco Services Company and has been working to develop the Aramco’s in-house next-generation reservoir simulator, TeraPOWERS. The necessity of modeling fluid flows and hydrocarbon production from the giant reservoirs in Saudi Arabia with high fidelity, places an enormous burden on computing resources that are unique to Saudi Aramco. Within this effort, Abishek has worked on improving the computational cost of phase-equilibrium calculations, modeling the phase behavior of hydrocarbons in unconventional resources at the molecular and continuum scale, and on calculating the initial conditions of the reservoir fluids accurately.