About

Mark, Lauren and Wayne

Mark McClure

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Mark McClure established ResFrac in 2015 to help operators maximize value through the application of advanced geomechanics and reservoir simulation.

Before founding ResFrac, Mark was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. After earning a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering and a Master of Science in petroleum engineering from Stanford University, Mark earned a PhD in energy resources engineering at Stanford. His academic research focuses on hydraulic fracturing, diagnostic fracture injection tests, induced seismicity, and enhanced geothermal systems.

Mark has earned multiple awards, including the Hank Ramey Award from Stanford University, Best Paper in Geophysics, an outstanding paper award at URTeC, Hart Energy 40 Under 40,  SPE Regional Awards for Completions Optimization and for Young Member Service, and SPE’s TWA Energy Influencers award. On four occasions, he has received recognition from journals as an outstanding reviewer.

In his free time, Mark enjoys hiking, playing with his dog, watching sports, and traveling.

Click here for a list of Mark’s publications.

Mark's posts

Technical barriers for deep closed-loop geothermal

This is the most exciting time in my lifetime for geothermal. There are many, many innovative things happening. To name a few – promising new approaches to Enhanced Geothermal Systems, geothermal projects in sedimentary and lower enthalpy formations, new approaches for geothermal exploration, lithium extraction from produced brines, geothermal energy storage, integrations with CO2 storage and capture, and new technologies for producing energy from hot water that is coproduced with oil and gas. However, this post is about a concept about which I remain skeptical – deep closed-loop heat exchangers (McClure, 2021). These designs are sometimes called ‘Advanced Geothermal Systems,’ AGS (Malek et al., 2022).

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Interesting papers from the 2023 SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference

The 2023 SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference was last week, and as usual, it had an outstanding lineup of papers and speakers. This blog post has a brief lineup of some of the papers that I found most interesting. As in past years, this rundown focuses on papers that I found interesting, based on my own personal interests. Usually, I am most interested in papers that improve our understanding ‘what’s going on’ in the subsurface. Also, I coauthored a paper at the conference, so naturally, I can’t help but include it on this list!

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Figure 5: Example simulation with ‘submesh fractal D’ set to 0.6.

Simulating ‘Fractal Fracture Swarms’ in a General-Purpose Reservoir Simulator

This blog post describes a new capability in ResFrac to capture the effect of ‘fracture swarms’ on production decline trends. Based on work from Acuna (2020), the idea is that variable spacing between fractures causes a gradual onset of production interference. Fractures in a swarm may be numerous and tightly spaced,  so rather than representing each individual crack in the model, we treat each swarm as a single crack and use a numerical technique to capture their effects. In ResFrac, this capability is useful because it provides another mechanism for explaining (and matching) production drawdown trends. For further details, refer to Section 19.10 from McClure et al. (2022).

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