About

Rohan surfing with son

Rohan Irvin

Senior Reservoir and Completions Engineer

Rohan Irvin is a reservoir engineer with 17 years of oil and gas experience at Oxy, Woodside, EnergyCapture, and others. He believes energy abundance is the foundation of a prosperous world. As a member of the ResFrac team, he can have the greatest impact on energy abundance by helping operators optimize their developments.

Prior to joining ResFrac, he advised EnergyCapture on the development of their unconventional gas assets in Queensland, Australia. Using ResFrac to evaluate and optimize their completion designs, he was able to significantly improve the economic value of the development. He has worked on most of the major basins in the US as well as West Africa, the Middle East, North West Shelf (Australia), and India. While with Oilex in India, he led the engineering evaluation of the country’s first horizontal, multi-stage frac completion. With Oxy, he led a multi-disciplinary subsurface team during the early evaluation of the Permian Basin’s unconventional potential. Throughout his career, he has been responsible for exploration support, appraisal data acquisition, development planning, and reservoir management of both conventional and unconventional assets.

Rohan received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in oil & gas engineering from the University of Western Australia (receiving the Dr. Mark Skinner Prize for the top final year student) and a Masters of Science in petroleum engineering from the University of Southern California.

Rohan is a husband and father of two, Queen’s Scout (Eagle Scout), multiple Ironman finisher, and surfer. He once watched the sun rise on New Year’s Day from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Rohan'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.

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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.

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