About

Dave Ratcliff shredding in a bike race

Dave Ratcliff

Director of User Success

Dave Ratcliff is a petrophysicist with more than 25 years of oil and gas experience.

Before joining ResFrac, he served as the Petrophysics Manager at QEP Resources and Forest Oil. Dave has extensive experience in a variety of basins throughout the U.S. including the Permian, Bakken, Haynesville, Uintah, Eagle Ford, and Cotton Valley, where he successfully used ResFrac as a tool for optimizing landing zones in multiple horizons as well as testing the variability of different frac and perforating designs. Prior to QEP and Forest Oil, Dave worked for Schlumberger for 15 years in a variety of capacities including operations manager, logging engineer, and marketing, where he gained comprehensive experience with perforating, open, and cased hole logging.

Dave received a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. When not working for ResFrac, Dave spends his free time exploring the 4WD trails of Colorado, bike riding and training (mountain, road, gravel), gardening, and making homemade ‘fruit’ wine (from strawberries and gooseberries he grows himself).

Dave'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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