Collaboration Between the Stanford Rock Fracture Project and the Petroleum Industry: A Mutually Beneficial Enterprise Resulting from Global Necessities: ABSTRACT

Abstract

The collaboration between the Stanford Rock Fracture Project (RFP) and industrial affiliates stems from RFP`s need to obtain support for its research activities and access to unpublished data and facilities owned by the affiliates, and from industry`s need to keep up with recent advances in the science and technology of predicting and characterizing fractures and faults in reservoirs and their flow properties with the lowest possible investment. It appears that a concerted effort by the US Government to encourage the application of results from ever decreasing federally-funded research to societal problems is the driving force for the former, and a desire to leverage and outsource research is behind the latter. Indeed, industry support provides a stabile funding to RFP, and in turn, the RFP provides a work force of 2 professors, 4 postdoctoral scientists and 14 graduate students along with state-of-the art educational and research facilities for an investment with a leverage ratio of better than 25 to 1. We present three different interaction schemes with examples that have proved to be workable for university-industry collaboration within the framework of RFP: (1) University personnel using data and facilities from industrial affiliates; (2) industry personnel bringing themselves up to date inmore » university workshops and facilities; and (3) joint team from industry and university working on an actual fractured reservoir characterization problem. Global conditions related to changing government funding patterns and to changing strategy for in-house research in industry have motivated us to build this university-industry collaboration which, in turn, made it possible to assemble a team of scientists of unprecedented size and expertise dedicated to research in rock fracturing and its impact on reservoir performance.« less