About

Chris Hewson

Senior Simulation Engineer

Chris Hewson is a Reservoir Simulation Engineer with ResFrac responsible for programming the reservoir simulator of ResFrac.

Prior to joining ResFrac, Chris was a Reservoir Simulation Engineer at Cenovus Energy, where he worked on an internal reservoir simulation software for modeling thermal oil recovery, a history matching and optimization software, and shifting the software to cloud use. Prior to Cenovus, Chris worked for The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research working on reservoir simulation studies and software for NOCs, Majors and Independent oil companies across the Middle East and Europe. During his internship, Chris worked at Equinor in Norway as a Reservoir Engineer evaluating offshore heavy oil completion techniques.

Chris obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Calgary and a Master of Science degree in Petroleum Engineering from Delft University of Technology.

Chris is passionate about backcountry skiing, mountain biking, and golf (he formerly worked as a golf pro). He’s married to a wonderful Wisconsinite who, despite his best efforts, refuses to switch to the metric system. They have an energetic 3-year-old son who loves trucks, cars, and basically anything that moves.

Click here for a list of Chris’ publications.

Chris's posts

What ‘company culture’ means to us

We recently held our annual company retreat. This is an important event because we are a fully remote company, and it gives us the chance to get together in-person and spend quality time. This year, we did the retreat in Houston, following URTeC and our annual symposium. We visited Space Center Houston, went to an Astros game, and ate BBQ and Tex-Mex. As a Houston native, I picked some of my favorite things to do in town! We also held a meeting on ‘company culture.’ I asked the group – how do you perceive our company culture? What do we do well, and what could we do better? Here are the highlights.

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Horizontal hydraulic fractures in shales: are they real?

In ResFrac, we are always challenging ourselves—what should we be doing better? What new capabilities should we add to the simulator? One of our newest projects is adding horizontal fracture propagation. Under most conditions, hydraulic fractures form vertically, not laterally. However, in specific circumstances, horizontal fractures develop. Sometimes, they form in addition to vertical fractures, and sometimes, they form exclusively without any vertical fractures. Horizontal fracture propagation has not conventionally been included in commercial hydraulic fracturing simulators, but we think this is a capability well-worth developing.

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Previewing the Seven(!) ResFrac Papers to be Presented at the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference

Next week, ResFrac will be coauthoring seven papers at the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC). These papers include: operator case studies in the Haynesville, Marcellus, and Bakken, a study quantifying the effect of proppant uniformity on production and economics, a new procedure generalizing the Devon Quantification of Interference (DQI) method, and an excellent paper by a University of Texas PhD student on proppant flowback.

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