At Shell TechWorks we collaborate with technology entrepreneurs and start-ups outside the industry to help solve one of the world’s greatest challenges: how to meet growing demand for affordable energy with less environmental impact.

Teaching Assistant - System Design & Management (SDM) Program

- Graduate Student from the System Design & Management (SDM) Program at MIT. Current GPA: 5.0- Teaching Assistant for the subject 6.929 - Energy Technology and Policy - taught by Prof. John Deutch, former Director Energy Research for the U.S. Department of Energy and former Director of the CIA. - Participating in the Sustainability Certificate from the MIT Sloan School of Management.- Participating in the MIT Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program.- Working on a Spring Project in “Concentrated Solar Power on Demand”- Courses Completed: System Dynamics I and II, System Design & Management I and II, Sustainable Energy, Entrepreneurship in Engineering and Negotiation Analysis.- Courses in Progress: System Design & Management III, Multidisciplinary System Design Optimization, Smart Grid Strategies for a Sustainable Future, Development of Mechanical Products, Mapping and Evaluating New Energy Technologies.

Summer Associate for Cyclotron Road, an accelerator program for hard energy technologies located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (http://www.cyclotronroad.org/).

In charge of capturing all the innovation in the subsurface space for Cenovus Energy, performing simulation studies of new inventions and leading the patent application process.- Twelve patents developed to date in the areas of in-situ combustion, SAGD, artificial lift, multilateral wells, waste heat recovery, electrical heating and solvent-aided processes.- Executed numerical simulation studies for each invention using the reservoir simulators STARS and/or SapSim. Various innovative heavy oil thermal recovery processes were studied including solvent-steam co-injection and in-situ combustion. - Contributed to an increase in the number of patent applications for Cenovus by six-fold for inventions related to oil recovery and subsurface technologies.- Created 4 patent-based landscapes for emerging technologies (electromagnetic heating, in-situ combustion, solvent-assisted processes and multilateral oil & gas wells) in the oilsands industry. Landscapes consists of a comprehensive technical review of the competitor’s patent filings and trends in a specific technology to obtain valuable competitive intelligence and to determine the technologies that our competitors are developing and are likely to develop. This also helps to identify any potential roadblocks to apply a specific technology in the field and provides insight into the areas where there might be space to continue developing technologies.

Managed a technical cooperation agreement with the largest Canadian oil producer created to develop and implement, at a commercial-scale, a series of innovative production technologies for process automation and overall optimization of a Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) operation in Western Canada. The end-goal was to reduce the environmental impact and costs and improve the energy efficiency and oil recovery of the operation. The project contributed to millions of dollars in cost reductions and it decreased the steam-to-oil ratio of the SAGD operation. Some of the activities of this project included:- Development and Field Testing of a nuclear multiphase flow meter to monitor SAGD production in real-time.- Numerical simulations to optimize the control and operation of SAGD wells in real-time using Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers. - Development of SAGD Real-Time automation and optimization workflows to control steam injection and electric submersible pumps (ESPs) using data from sensors and fiber optics.- Evaluate (numerically) the performance of flow control devices to improve steam conformance in SAGD wells.- Assess next-generation reservoir simulation technologies to perform high-resolution large-scale numerical simulations of multi-pad SAGD operations.

- Worked at the Abingdon Technology Center in the UK, a center dedicated to the development of commercial reservoir engineering software. I was responsible for testing and evaluating a variety of new reservoir engineering tools available in the ECLIPSE reservoir simulator and Petrel software to ensure that the engineering calculations where consistent and accurate and that the software code was efficient and stable. Some examples include:- In-Situ Combustion and Chemical Reactions in ECLIPSE Thermal- Well completion design and Multi-segmented wells- Designed new engineering features to be implemented in the reservoir engineering software and participate with the computer programmers in the software development process.- Member of the ECLIPSE reservoir simulator Commercialization & Support Team. Responsible for providing support to reservoir simulation projects worldwide. Conducted several numerical simulation projects to evaluate thermal heavy oil recovery processes such as SAGD and in-situ combustion for fields located in Mexico and Venezuela.

- Performed simulation studies of SAGD for heavy oil reservoirs located in the Orinoco Belt. Main activities included migrating the thermal fluid model from CMG STARS to ECLIPSE Thermal, developing a multisegmented wellbore model for the SAGD pairs, selecting the optimum inter-well spacing, well horizontal lengths and injection/production controls to optimize recovery. - Conducted an offshore Gas Field project. Created four ECLIPSE simulation models integrated through a common PIPESIM network. The integrated simulation model was used to design and optimize the development strategy (surface facilities, well locations and completion strategy). Other activities included development of compositional fluid models, flow assurance analysis and an uncertainty quantification study using experimental design methodology and Monte Carlo Analysis on the integrated asset model.- Provided technical support of the ECLIPSE Reservoir Simulation software and Petrel Geo-modeling software for operating companies in Venezuela, Trinidad and the Caribbean.- Certified Instructor for ECLIPSE Reservoir Simulation & Petrel Reservoir Engineering Training Courses.

- Engineering testing of the ECLIPSE reservoir simulation software prior to the commercial release.- Provide Reservoir Engineering support to various Reservoir Simulation projects worldwide.

- Build geological 3D numerical models (geostatistical realizations) of a hydrocarbon reservoir based on seismic and petrophysical data. - Designed well trajectories for horizontal and multi-lateral wells to maximize oil recovery for a given set of conditions.- Calculated well connection factors and inflow performance for a variety of advanced well configurations using a modified Peaceman formula that accounts for arbitrary well trajectories intersecting a 3D numerical grid and a multisegmented wellbore model to account for pressure losses due to friction, acceleration and phase slippage.- Developed an automated workflow to integrate the Petrel Geological and Geophysical software and the ECLIPSE numerical reservoir simulator to update the geological models in real-time based on the logging-while-drilling (LWD) and measurement-while-drilling (MWD) information and perform real-time geosteering of the well using simulation while drilling.- Thesis presented and published in the proceedings of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Intelligent Energy Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. SPE 99945: Simulation While Drilling: Utopia or Reality?