About

Chris Ponners

Senior Reservoir and Completions Engineer

Christopher Ponners is a Consulting Engineer at ResFrac where he uses physics-based modeling to explore development projects with the dual goal of economic optimization and enhancement of subsurface knowledge.

He brings a background in energy finance with experience in the mineral rights and mezzanine financing spaces, having conducted production forecasting, reserves evaluations, economic analyses, and the development plan appraisals in all major U.S. shale basins.

Prior to joining ResFrac, he served as Managing Director at Meadowood Energy Partners and as Reservoir Engineer at Tregan Energy Partners, mineral and royalty interest investment firms. Chris also has reservoir engineering experience with Apache Corporation and Netherland, Sewell & Associates where he performed extensive reservoir modeling, fracture characterization, and directional drilling optimization.

Chris received a Bachelor of Science in Petroleum Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, graduating with Highest Honors and a certificate in Computational Science in Engineering. While at the University of Texas, Mr. Ponners authored a thesis on his research in Enhanced Oil Recovery technologies and studied petroleum geology at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He resides in Dallas, Texas where he is a long-distance runner, musician, and DIY enthusiast.

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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