Cont. Ed: Accelerated Learning Tutorial: Fundamentals of Reservoir Simulation

Dr. J. Robert Gochnour recently retired after 40 years in technology mostly associated with reservoir simulation technology.  At his retirement, Dr. Gochnour was the manager of Advanced Reservoir Simulation Development and Deployment for BP Subsurface Technology in Houston, Texas, responsible for the development and delivery of new reservoir simulation technology to BP reservoir engineers worldwide. Dr. Gochnour mentored many BP reservoir and petroleum engineers and was extremely active in campus recruiting for specialist reservoir engineers. Dr. Gochnour earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in petroleum and natural gas engineering from Pennsylvania State University. In 1996, Dr. Gochnour was named a Centennial Fellow for the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Penn State University.  He has been a member of SPE since 1973 and has taught some 200 industry short courses as well as graduate petroleum engineering courses at the University of Pittsburgh, West Virginia University and the University of Houston. 

Dr. Gochnour has been associated with the research, development, and application of reservoir simulators, reservoir engineering, and production technology throughout his career with Gulf Oil Corporation (9 years), Chevron (6 years), and Scientific Software-Intercomp (2 years), Tigress (5 years) and 18 years with BP.    

He is currently sits on the Board of Directors for Foundation CMG.  He is a past board member of The College of Engineering Diversity Program board at Penn State, The University of Texas Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences and The University of Texas Board of Visitors for the Petroleum and Geoscience Engineering Department.

Dr. Gorell is a senior simulation technologist with almost 30 years of experience in the oil and gas industry. His areas of expertise include geologic and reservoir modeling, characterization, simulation, uncertainty analysis and optimization. He is experienced in management, consulting, research, development of software algorithms and interfaces, training, testing and product commercialization.

Dr. Sheldon Gorell holds the position of Vice President of Technology with RPS Knowledge Reservoir, providing leadership in all aspects of its technology delivery to the market. He is responsible for both the subsurface and surface elements of the business. Prior to joining RPS Knowledge Reservoir, Dr. Gorell was employed by Halliburton as a Chief Technologist and Subject Matter Expert and by Landmark Software and Services where he served as a Research Fellow and Director of Reservoir Management Software.   

Dr. Gorell brings with him many years of experience in numerical modeling, reservoir simulation, and reservoir engineering in general, after tenure with Western Atlas Software, Landmark Graphics and Halliburton. Prior to Western Atlas Software, Dr. Gorell spent nine years with Shell Development Company as a Senior Research Engineer. Dr. Gorell holds MS and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.