About

Chris Ponners

Reservoir and Completions User Success Lead

Christopher Ponners is a Senior Reservoir and Completions Engineer, as well as the Reservoir and Completions User Success Lead at ResFrac where he uses physics-based modeling to explore development projects with the dual goal of economic optimization and enhancing 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

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.

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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).

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