Dean S. Oliver
Professor in Petroleum Engineering
Mewbourne School of Petroleum & Geological Engineering
University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma

E-mail address: dsoliver@ou.edu Office phone: (405) 325-2921 Fax:(405) 325-7477 Office address: Mewbourne School of Petroleum & Geological Engineering University of Oklahoma 100 East Boyd Street, SEC Room T301 Norman, OK 73019

Summary

Dean Oliver is the Mewbourne Chair Professor in the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering at the University of Oklahoma and the Director of the OU Center for Ensemble Methods. He holds a BS degree in Physics and a PhD in Geophysics. He was Director of the Mewbourne School from 2002 to 2006. Prior to joining The University of Oklahoma, he was a professor in the Petroleum Engineering department at The University of Tulsa for six years, the last year as Chairman. He worked seventeen years for Chevron as a research geophysicist, a staff reservoir engineer for Chevron USA and for Saudi Aramco, and as a research scientist in reservoir characterization. He has received best paper of the year awards in two journals and received the SPE Reservoir Description and Dynamics award in 2004. He was awarded Distinguished Member status in SPE in 2008. He is currently the Executive Editor of SPE Journal. His research interests are in inverse theory, reservoir characterization, uncertainty quantification, and optimization.

More details can be found in Dean Oliver's cv.

Photographs from a recent (July 2006) trip to China are here.

Research projects

History matching of geologic facies. Current research projects focus on the use of the ensemble Kalman filter for data assimilation and control of petroleum reservoirs. Several problems are of particular interest.

1. Application of ensemble methods to highly nonlinear data-model relationships such as might be found in multiphase flow in porous media. Because of the nonlinearity of the relationships, the pdf for saturation can be bimodal in parts of the reservoir. We are pursuing several approaches, one that requires development of an iterative filter, and the other that uses a reparameterization of the saturation variable. We are also, investigating properties of the square-root filter.
2. Application of ensemble methods to highly non-Gaussian model variables such as might occur in reservoirs with geologic facies. Previous work on history matching of 2D facies boundaries is being extended to 3D reservoirs.
3. Application of ensemble methods to reservoir problems with large numbers of correlated state variables. We are particularly interested in compositional modeling.
4. Robust optimization of reservoir production using ensemble methods both for data assimilation and for optimal control.

Current students

Former students (University of Oklahoma)

Former students (University of Tulsa)