Craig Cipolla

Senior Technical Fellow

[email protected]

Craig Cipolla is a Senior Technical Fellow at ResFrac, providing hydraulic fracturing and unconventional reservoir engineering advisory services.

Craig currently supports select companies deploying industry-leading technologies and brings more than four decades of global experience across hydraulic fracturing, subsurface fracture diagnostics, geomechanics, geophysics, and fractured-reservoir modeling.

Craig retired from full-time employment after a 45-year career in the energy industry, with roles at Dresser Titan, CER Corporation, Union Pacific Resources, Pinnacle Technologies/Carbo, SLB, and Hess/Chevron. Throughout his career, he has focused on the application of innovative technologies and workflows to improve well productivity and maximize hydrocarbon recovery.

Craig is widely recognized for his contributions to hydraulic fracturing and completion optimization. He has co-authored more than 90 technical papers, served as an SPE Distinguished Lecturer on hydraulic fracturing, and received the prestigious SPE International Completion Optimization and Technology Award. He is also an SPE Distinguished Member and has chaired and served on organizing committees for numerous SPE conferences, workshops, and forums.

Craig's posts

$Figure 2. The ResFrac model of the original completion: tall fractures that grow up into overlying benches while proppant stays mostly in the target interval.$

Targeting the reserves between clusters: modeling strategic refracs and infills in ResFrac

Older, wide-spacing Delaware Basin wells can leave high-pressure rock stranded between fractures. Devon used ResFrac to design liner refracs whose peak rates came in within 1% of forecast, and to show why an offset infill beats a refrac at tight cluster spacing.

Automatic Report Generation in ResFracPro

This month’s release has a feature that I am particularly excited about – automatic report generation. The reports are generated automatically when a simulation finishes. Also, reports can be generated on-demand for simulations that have already been completed. The reports are highly customizable, allowing the user to generate different line plots, 3D visualizations, preview plots, and tabular data. The user can provide a template PPT, so that the report is made with their preferred PPT style.

Introducing ResFrac’s New Multisector Capability

This month’s ResFrac release has a ton of new capabilities. The most important is called ‘multisector’ – the ability to split different sections of the well across different computers. This capability provides a computationally efficient and practical way to run larger models and handle complex scenarios. Hats off to Danial Zeinabady and Michael Nole, who have been the main developers on this project. Beyond them, it’s been a big team effort, pulling in folks from cloud, simulator, and user-success. First, let’s review – what is sector modeling? Why do we need a ‘multi’ version of it?