Danial Zeinabady

Senior Software Developer

[email protected]

Before joining ResFrac, Danial served as a reservoir engineering specialist at ShearFrac, where he spearheaded the development of a fully automated application for real-time post-fracture pressure decay analysis. He holds a PhD in petroleum engineering from the University of Calgary and a Bachelor’s degree in reservoir engineering from the Petroleum University of Technology in Iran. During his doctoral research, Danial focused on advancing the design and analysis of the diagnostic fracture injection test-flowback analysis (DFIT-FBA) method. During this time, he collaborated with leading oil and gas companies such as Ovintiv, Birchcliff Energy, ConocoPhillips, Origin Energy, TotalEnergies, and Encino Energy to implement the DFIT-FBA technique.

In his free time, Danial enjoys hiking, playing squash, volleyball, and avidly following mixed martial arts, football, and soccer.

Click here for a list of Danial’s publications.

Danial's posts

Production Impact of Horizontal Fractures

At the 2025 SPE International Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference, we (Dontsov, Zoback, McClure, and Fowler) presented “Hydraulic Fracture Propagation Along Bedding Planes Might Be More Prevalent Than We Think” (SPE-226637). The paper reviewed case studies with evidence of horizontal or bedding plane fractures from microseismic, fiber optics, core observations, and casing deformation.

Testing the new Kryvenko model for proppant washout

What controls proppant placement during hydraulic fracturing? As described in Chapter 8 from McClure et al. (2025), ResFrac incorporates a variety of physical processes – viscous drag, gravitational settling, hindered settling, clustered settling, bed slumping, and more. In addition, ResFrac accounts for the complex physics associated with proppant flowing out of the wellbore (Dontsov, 2023; Ponners et al., 2025).

$Horizontal fracture initiated along weak bedding plane or frictional interface in ResFrac$

Horizontal hydraulic fractures in ResFrac

Horizontal hydraulic fracture propagation is believed to be widespread in shale plays where the frac gradient approaches the overburden – such as the Vaca Muerta, Utica, and Montney. However, horizontal propagation is nearly always ignored in hydraulic fracture modeling. In ResFrac, we are obsessed with ‘getting the physics right’, and so naturally, we extended our simulator to handle horizontal fracturing. The first version of this new capability was released earlier this year. We are eager to start collecting feedback from users, which will help us to fine tune the algorithm and workflow.