Bill Slack Email & Phone Number

Blue Ash, Ohio, United States

FRx provides hydraulic fracturing and other injection services to support remediation of contaminated soil and groundwater, i.e. environmental clean-up.Together with my partner, Larry Murdoch, I started FRx after collaborating with him as Principal Investigators on US EPA research projects that developed the core technologies we now practice. As small specialty contractor, we serve a niche market across the country and around the world. I'm essentially director of operations while Larry is the nominal president and technology director, which distracts from his position as professor of geology at Clemson. My responsibilities range from emptying the waste basket beside my desk to negotiating the deals and contracts that drive the work, with anything and everything else in between. There is still a lot of engineer in me, which complements Larry's geology.

The University of Cincinnati operated an off-campus laboratory dedicated to serving grants and contracts from the US EPA Office of Research and Development. While Larry Murdoch directed the efforts to develop hydraulic fracturing as a remediation tool, I lead almost all of the other geotechnical research efforts, including soil mixing studies, in situ stabilization work, SVE thermal enhancement, and contaminant transport assessment. Larry and I frequently conferred and collaborated to build synergetic extensions among various technologies.

As my final job in the oil industry, I managed a dozen petroleum engineers who worked to keep up oil and gas production from over 10,000 wells that were spread out over a dozen oilfields in a couple of west Texas counties. This team performed reservoir and production engineering functions and worked closely with the complimentary department of drilling engineers. In particular, we designed an intensive work-over program that typically called for four hydraulic fracture operations per day in addition to more routine well maintenance. I pushed the staff to tighten their budget estimates for proposed work and sharpen the projections of expected production enhancement – an economic trade-off that became increasingly critical as the easy opportunities and “low-hanging-fruit” were pursued. During the oil price slump in the mid 80’s, I conducted reservoir studies and assessed the economics of particular oilfields. Much of this effort relied upon numerical models that today can be considered primitive. This job gave me exposure to oilfields ranging from the largest to the smallest whether operated by Chevron or by a joint-venture partner.

I started in the research labs near Pittsburgh, working on problems in enhanced oil recovery - a technology then thought to be a pathway to national energy independence. Most of that work supported carbon dioxide flooding, with focus on flow and conformance issues. In this job I learned the fundamentals of flow in porous media from Pete Ramondi, Bob Erhich, Reid Crookston and others. When the Pittsburgh unit relocated to Houston, I moved into more of a technical support job, which lead me to a staff job in the Gulf field office in Columbia, Mississippi. That was a short stint, but eye-opening. Not only did I discover first-hand the diversity of culture in our country - I was the only yankee boy in town for a while - but I learned the muddy realities of field work. When Chevron took over Gulf, I moved back to Houston.

B.S., Chemical Engineering

M.S., Chemical Engineering

Ph.D., Chemical Engineering