Tristen Lawrence

Operations Manager

[email protected]

As Operations Manager at ResFrac, Tristen keeps the back office running smoothly, ensuring efficient processes, seamless customer experiences, and well-executed outreach efforts.

Prior to joining ResFrac, Tristen worked in brand management and business operations for a small marketing firm in Central CA, where she refined her skills in branding, marketing, and business management. This experience sparked a deep appreciation for user research and the importance of intuitive, user-centered design to drive business success and measurable impact for clients. In addition to her operational expertise, Tristen is a UX/UI designer and WordPress site builder, always on the lookout for ways to enhance digital experiences.

Outside of work for ResFrac, Tristen is mom to four rowdy kids and spends her evenings and weekends balancing family chaos and many hobbies. She makes it a practice to try to catch the sunrise over the Atlantic at least twice a week, volunteers with the local aquarium’s stranding response team to rescue and rehabilitate sea turtles, and enjoys sailing, live music, and great food. Tristen’s fuel is coffee and memes, and brings energy, humor and a bit of nonsense to everything she takes on.

Tristen's posts

Production impact of horizontal fractures

At the 2025 SPE International Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference, we (Dontsov, Zoback, McClure, and Fowler) presented “Hydraulic Fracture Propagation Along Bedding Planes Might Be More Prevalent Than We Think” (SPE-226637). The paper reviewed case studies with evidence of horizontal or bedding plane fractures from microseismic, fiber optics, core observations, and casing deformation.

Testing the new Kryvenko model for proppant washout

What controls proppant placement during hydraulic fracturing? As described in Chapter 8 from McClure et al. (2025), ResFrac incorporates a variety of physical processes – viscous drag, gravitational settling, hindered settling, clustered settling, bed slumping, and more. In addition, ResFrac accounts for the complex physics associated with proppant flowing out of the wellbore (Dontsov, 2023; Ponners et al., 2025).

$Horizontal fracture initiated along weak bedding plane or frictional interface in ResFrac$

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.