25 YEARS OF CONSORTIUM ACTIVITIES BY THE NUMBERS
August 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of uninterrupted and successful activities by our research consortium. Much has happened since the first annual consortium meeting in 2000. Undoubtedly, our consortium work has positively impacted the discipline of Formation Evaluation in ways that were not anticipated 25 years ago. It was hard to predict back then the influence that we would eventually have in the acquisition and interpretation of borehole geophysical measurements. Academic research units are often questioned for their marginal influence in everyday applications; and we were being looked at with the same optics. Fast forwarding 25 years, it is difficult to find a formation evaluation expert who might dispute the value of our work and the impact that we have had in the discipline. We are humbled to state that the year of 2000 is a historical watershed in the discipline of Formation Evaluation because of the beginning of our consortium activities. Nowadays, we anticipate even more interesting and challenging projects that will bring new knowledge, new concepts and methods, and new applications. Excellence will continue to be our hallmark in that process!
If we were asked to list the most important achievements by the consortium during the last 25 years, the following items will conform our highlighted summary:
- We remain the top academic research group in the world in the discipline of Formation Evaluation.
- We have maintained a significant number of sponsoring companies, reaching 35 in 2016 and 18 currently.
- We graduated 49 PhD and 53 MSc students. Currently, there are 11 PhD students in the program. Likewise, there have been 32 postdoctoral fellows and research scientists supported by the consortium, most of them now actively engaged in Formation Evaluation activities with operating or service companies, or in academia. Six of our graduated PhD students are now professors at international universities practicing, spreading, and expanding far and wide the discipline of Formation Evaluation. Our graduate students are recognized as a leading technical force among industry groups dedicated to Formation Evaluation around the world. Many of them have already achieved influential positions in the industry.
- Four of our graduated students have been (or will soon become) Presidents of the SPWLA. Likewise, our graduated students continue to take very active roles in the SPWLA, with 9 former and current members of the SPWLA Board of Directors.
- Our instruction efforts in the discipline of Formation Evaluation have reached more than 3500 undergraduate and graduate students and industry personnel. Instruction efforts have already been deployed in modern social media, reaching an audience of more than 15,000 viewers around the world.
- We introduced unprecedented methods for the rapid numerical simulation of nuclear, sonic, resistivity, and magnetic resonance logs in vertical and high-angle wells, which made it possible to perform separate and joint inversion of well logs for much improved petrophysical and mechanical quantitative assessments of spatially heterogeneous rocks. Our simulation and inversion methods have been adopted by service companies and continue to be used by operating companies to interpret borehole measurements.
- We developed new methods for the quantitative interpretation of two-phase flow properties of rocks from the simulation of the process of mud-filtrate invasion and its impact on well logs.
- We developed an innovative, non-commercial software platform (3D UTAPWeLS) for the construction of multi-layer reservoir models from well logs, and for the effective quantitative integration of borehole measurements and core data to estimate storage and flow properties of rocks. Rapid numerical simulation and inversion of well logs with and without presence of mud-filtrate invasion is at the heart of 3D UTAPWeLS. Several operating and service companies routinely use UTAPWeLS to approach non-trivial petrophysical and geomechanical interpretation problems. It is precisely the non-commercial nature of our software that allows us to interact freely and closely with both service and operating companies.
- We published 270 refereed journal papers, 280 refereed conference extended abstracts, and delivered 105 oral presentations at professional conferences. There have been 7 patents issued from work/projects developed by the consortium.
- We received 10 major international awards from SPWLA, SPE, SEG, and EAGE, 4 Best Paper awards from SPWLA, 2 Best Presentation awards from SPWLA, and 1 Best Paper award from SEG.
- We raised approximately 32.7 Million USD of total research funding from industry, federal, state, and other international agencies.
- We initiated a new successful sub-consortium for improved fast modeling and inversion of deep-sensing borehole electromagnetic measurements (i.e., UDAR measurements).
Even though landmarks are to be celebrated and honored, we shall not pause to bask in the laurels of a glorious path, for the road of the future is very likely sowed with equal or better developments and research opportunities. We also look forward to your continued support!