Louis J. Durlofsky

Professor and Chair of Energy Resources Engineering
Department of Energy Resources Engineering
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2220
USA
phone: 650-723-4142
fax: 650-725-2099
lou@stanford.edu

 

Courses Taught or Co-taught:
Currently teaching Advanced Reservoir Engineering (ENERGY 222), Reservoir Simulation (ENERGY 223), Advanced Reservoir Simulation (ENERGY 224), and Energy and the Environment (ENERGY/EARTHSYS 101).
Advanced Reservoir Engineering covers:

  • Single phase flow
  • Permeability tensor
  • Radial flow and skin
  • Succession of steady states
  • Injectivity in a depleted reservoir and in liquid-filled systems
  • Gravity forces and flow potential
  • Equations governing two phase flow, effects of compressibility and gravity
  • Vertical sweep (layered reservoirs, vertical equilibrium)
  • Streamlines and potential flow
  • Unsteady radial flow (primary drainage, line source solutions)

Reservoir Simulation (co-taught with Margot Gerritsen and Hamdi Tchelepi) covers:

  • Single phase flow (steady and transient) in one, two and three dimensions
  • Implicit solution and Newton’s method
  • General multiphase, multi-component reservoir flow equations
  • Reduction to the black-oil model
  • Discretization of the black-oil model
  • Transmissibility and upwinding
  • Stability and time step control
  • Treatment of wells
  • Solution of linear equations
  • Discretization, grids and errors
  • Compositional modeling
  • Thermal modeling
  • Fractured reservoir modeling

Advanced Reservoir Simulation is taught by several ERE faculty and addresses a number of specialized areas. My lectures in this course cover:

  • Techniques for single-phase parameter upscaling
  • Upscaling for transport calculations (flow-based grids, use of pseudo-relative permeability)
  • Use of full-tensor permeability and multipoint flux in reservoir simulation
  • Use of complex grids in reservoir simulation

Energy and the Environment is an undergraduate-level class addressing energy use and its environmental impacts, with emphasis on fossil fuels. Topics covered include large-scale energy use and trends, properties of fossil fuels, energy processes, transportation and carbon management. This class is co-taught with Tony Kovscek and Margot Gerritsen and (in ERE).