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

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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