Julian McDowell

Geothermal Team Lead

[email protected]

Julian McDowell is the Geothermal Team Lead at ResFrac, where he drives the company’s geothermal strategy—leading simulation and technical studies, growing ResFrac’s geothermal service offerings, and delivering training to clients and internal teams.

Julian brings a background in geothermal reservoir engineering and geoscience, with over 19 years of experience across consulting and operations roles spanning the US, New Zealand, Indonesia, the Philippines, East Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Prior to joining ResFrac, Julian was the geothermal resources market lead for Jacobs in North America, where he developed his expertise in Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), including technical due diligence and well testing support projects. Earlier, at Contact Energy in New Zealand, he served as modeling lead for the company’s 400+ MWe portfolio of hydrothermal generation assets and reservoir development lead for the 172 MWe Tauhara project. His exposure to a wide range of geothermal resources at every stage of assessment, development, and management has given him a valuable perspective on what it takes to move prospects through assessment and development gates to project execution and operation.

Julian earned a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science from Trinity College Dublin, a Master of Science in Applied Environmental Geology from Cardiff University, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Geothermal Energy Technology from the University of Auckland.

Julian is a husband and father of two, a keen downhill mountain biker, a “functional” skier, and an occasional tennis player. A planned career break years ago took him to Italy, where he learned the language and has kept it up ever since.

Julian'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?