About

Mark Zoback

Senior Executive Advisor

Mark Zoback is the Benjamin M. Page Professor of Geophysics and the Director of the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative at Stanford University.

He co-directs SCITS Stanford Center for Induced and Triggered Seismicity (SCITS) and the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage (SCCS). Dr. Zoback conducts research on in situ stress, fault mechanics, and reservoir geomechanics. He is the author/co-author of over 300 technical papers, holder of five patents and author of two books. Reservoir Geomechanics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 is now it’s 15th printing. His online course, also entitled Reservoir Geomechanics, has been completed by over 10,000 students around the world.

Mark’s book, Unconventional Reservoir Geomechanics, written with Arjun Kohli, was released by Cambridge Press in April, 2019. Dr. Zoback has received a number of awards and honors, including the 2008 Walter H. Bucher Medal of the American Geophysical Union. In 2011 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and in 2012 was elected to Honorary Membership of the Society of Exploration Geophysics. He was the 2013 recipient of the Louis Néel Medal of the European Geosciences Union and named an Einstein Chair Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2015 he received the Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award of the AAPG and in 2016 received the Outstanding Contribution to the Public Understanding of the Geosciences Award from the American Geological Institute.

Mark'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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