Egor Dontsov

Chief Scientist

[email protected]

Egor Dontsov is a scientist with over ten years of academic and industrial experience.

Prior to joining ResFrac, Egor worked at W.D. Von Gonten Laboratories, the University of Houston as Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the University of British Columbia as Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in the Mathematics Department. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota and Bachelor’s degree with honors in Physics at Novosibirsk State University.

Egor’s primary expertise area lies in theoretical and numerical modeling of hydraulic fracturing, proppant transport, and geomechanics. He has written and been exposed to the development of several academic and commercial simulators of hydraulic fracturing, proppant transport, and reservoir flow. Egor served as a reviewer for dozens of journals and several scientific proposals within and outside of the US, invited multiple times to give keynote lectures and seminars, as well as participated in organization of minisymposia at international conferences and workshops. Egor has published over fifty peer reviewed papers and received several awards, including Outstanding Technical Editor Service Award from SPE Journal in 2018, N.G.W. Cook award, as well as Best Dissertation award from University of Minnesota to name a few.

On the personal side, Egor leads an active lifestyle, and has climbed over 100 mountains. Over the last decade, he has also enjoyed cross-country skiing, running, mountain and road biking, hiking, and downhill and backcountry skiing. He has recently moved to triathlons. Within a single year, Egor finished his first ever triathlon – ironman distance, earned All World Athlete status, and qualified for US Triathlon National Championship.

Click here for a list of Egors’ publications.

Egor's posts

$Horizontal fracture initiated along weak bedding plane or frictional interface in ResFrac$

Horizontal hydraulic fractures in ResFrac

Horizontal hydraulic fracture propagation is believed to be widespread in shale plays where the frac gradient approaches the overburden – such as the Vaca Muerta, Utica, and Montney. However, horizontal propagation is nearly always ignored in hydraulic fracture modeling. In ResFrac, we are obsessed with ‘getting the physics right’, and so naturally, we extended our simulator to handle horizontal fracturing. The first version of this new capability was released earlier this year. We are eager to start collecting feedback from users, which will help us to fine tune the algorithm and workflow.

Advanced ‘proppant transport in the well’ capabilities are now implemented in ResFrac!

Proppant transport in the well is an intriguing topic that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years [1-8]. Proppant transport processes determine the uniformity of proppant placement, which has a direct impact on productivity. Cipolla et al. estimate that the difference between poor and excellent proppant uniformity is about $2.5M in net present value per well.

Digesting the Bonkers, Incredible, Off-the-Charts, Spectacular Results from the Fervo and FORGE Enhanced Geothermal Projects

I’m out of superlatives – I used them all up in the title. But seriously – Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) projects have had a really, really good summer. In this article, I summarize the results that have been recently presented by Fervo and FORGE. At their annual Tech Day and in a white paper posted this week (Norbeck et al., 2024), Fervo Energy provided their first update on Project Cape, a Utah project where they are developing 400 MWe of new production over the next two years. So far, fourteen wells have been drilled, and three of them have been stimulated.