Professor Nam H. Tran
School of Petroleum Engineering
The University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052 Australia
namtran@unsw.edu.au

Abstract: Natural fractures are mechanical breaks or discontinuities in rocks, which form in nature in response to high fluid pressures, lithostatic, thermal and tectonic stresses. Naturally fractured reservoirs cover the world’s 50% remaining oil and gas reserves and 100% of the renewable geothermal resources. They also exist in coal beds, groundwater resources and underground (nuclear waste) storages. Thus, comprehensive understanding of how the fractures occur in the reservoirs and how the fluid flows inside the rock and fracture system is critical in various earth sciences. However, it is also concomitantly and scientifically challenging, due to the reservoirs' extreme complexity, due to the lack of efficient techniques to integrate field data and due to inadequate understanding of rock and fluid behaviors under reservoir conditions. This work identifies and overcomes such problems. Based on the applications of the most advanced techniques (e.g. geostatistics, fractal geometry, artificial intelligence, control volume boundary element method, finite element method), naturally fractured reservoirs can be characterized and simulated, optimizing production of the deep-earth resources.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Dr. Tran H. Nam is a Professor/ Lecturer at the School of Petroleum Engineering, the University of New South Wales.
His work in developing naturally fractured petroleum and geothermal reservoirs is highly regarded both in Australia and on international level, as evidenced by invitations to act as session chair at conferences; to Scientific Advisory Board for Linx Research’s Network of Energy; and to Editorial Boards of seven (7) international journals, including the prestigous Petroleum Science and Technology (Taylor & Francis) and Computers & Geosciences (Elsevier). His research activity has resulted in an increased demand for participation in review panels for a wide range of scientific journals, including Advances in Water Resources, Petroleum Journals online, Petroleum Science and Engineering and Journal of Hydrology. Dr. Tran’s expertise in the field is also shown through a large number of industrial collaborative projects (with ONGC, Scopenergy Ltd., Santos Ltd., Magellan Petroleum and Sydney Gas P/L). He has collaborations internationally (CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, CSIRO Petroleum Resources, FrOG Tech, Sigma1 Geomechanics, University of Tokyo and University of Tulsa). Although the majority of his contributions were made through industry-focussed projects, Dr. Tran has managed to disseminate his research findings by publishing a large number of scholarly papers in refereed publications, some high standing journals in the fields of petroleum, geothermal and computer engineering (Petroleum Science and Technology, Geothermal Resources Council Transactions, Computers & Geosciences and Mathematical and Computer Modelling). He is either the sole or lead (and corresponding) author in 85% of the publications.