ESE Industrial Affiliate Programs

Smart Fields Consortium

Directors: Khalid Aziz  and Louis Durlofsky
Annual Membership: $50,000
Research focus: The real-time monitoring, model updating and optimal control of oil and gas fields is known in the industry by various names, including Smart Fields, i-fields, e-fields, closed-loop reservoir management, etc. Such a system could be implemented in existing fields or in new fields that are developed by using optimization techniques to determine the location, number and type of wells.

Stanford Center for Carbon Storage (SCCS)

Directors: Sally Benson, Anthony Kovscek, and Mark Zoback
Annual membership: $100,000
Research focus: questions related to CO2 sequestration in saline aquifers and shale and coal formations, as well as in mature or depleted oil and gas reservoirs as part of enhanced recovery/sequestration/storage projects. Building upon the successful CO2 storage research undertaken over the past eight years in the Global Climate and Energy Project, twelve Stanford professors from the Departments of Energy Resources Engineering, Geological and Environmental Sciences and Geophysics have established the SCCS to cover a broad range of fundamental scientific questions needed to consider implementation of large-scale projects within the next several decades.

Stanford Center for Earth Reservoir Forecasting (SCERF)

Directors: Louis Durlofsky and Tapan Mukerji
Annual membership: $75,000
Research focus: general problem of reservoir characterization and performance, including forecasting, interpreting reservoir geology and geophysics, geostatistics, reservoir engineering, and simulation.

Stanford Earth Sciences Algorithm & Architectures Initiative (SESAAI)

Directors: Biondo Biondi and Hamdi Tchelepi
Annual membership: $20,000
Research focus: integrates Earth science and computer science to build capacity in computational methods for the Earth and environmental sciences and enable new growth in areas where computational activities exist already.

SUETRI-A (Stanford University Energy Transition Research Institute): Enhanced Recovery of Oil and Unconventional Resources

Director: Anthony R. Kovscek
Annual membership: $44,000
Research focus: oil and gas recovery mechanisms and methods for enhancing recovery from heavy and light oil, dual porosity media,  and shale using heat, chemical, and gas injection.

SUETRI-B (Stanford University Energy Transition Research Institute): Reservoir Simulation Affiliates

Directors: Khalid Aziz, Louis Durlofsky, and Hamdi Tchelepi
Annual membership: $40,000
Research focus: Development of new methods and numerical techniques for modeling complex flow and transport processes in natural porous media, including the design and optimization of field operations under uncertainty.

SUETRI-D (Stanford University Energy Transition Research Institute): Well Test Interpretation Affiliates

Director: Roland N. Horne
Annual membership: $20,000
Research focus: automated methods for well test interpretation.

SUPRI-Tides (Stanford University Petroleum Research Institute): Analysis of Earth Tides

Directors: Roland N. Horne, Daniel Tartakovsky and Kozo Soto
Annual membership: $50,000
Research focus: explore the behavior of earth tides and how the data might be used to understand the physical properties of the Earth.

Petroleum Geology Affiliates

Director: Stephan A. Graham
Annual membership: $10,000
Research focus: base-line geologic studies of the petroleum-producing San Joaquin Basin and other basins to better document their geologic history and identify new concepts of exploration and secondary recovery.