Alain Gringarten

He is Emeritus Professor of Petroleum Engineering and Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College in London (UK). From 1997 to 2015, he was director of the Centre for Petroleum Studies at Imperial. Prior to joining Imperial College, he spent fourteen years with Scientific Software-Intercomp; five years with Schlumberger in Melun, France and in Houston Texas, USA; and five years with the Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières in Orléans, France, in various senior technical and management positions.
 
A member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) since 1969, he received the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Formation Evaluation award for 2001, the 2003 SPE John Franklin Carll award, the 2005 SPE Cedric K. Ferguson certificate for the best technical paper published in 2004, and the North Sea SPE Regional Service Award for 2009. He was a SPE Distinguished Lecturer for 2003-2004 and was elected a Distinguished Member in 2002, and an Honorary Member in 2009.
 
He has chaired or organized many SPE Advanced Technology Workshops, and has been a member of the SPE International committees on: Research and Development (R&D) Advisory Committee (2010-2013); Information and Management (2011-2014); Honorary and Distinguished Member Awards (2011-2014 ); Carll-Uren-Lester Awards (2009-2012); Nico van Wingen Fellowship (2013-2015); PE Faculty Pipeline Award (2012-2015); and was the 2011 chairman of the SPE Talent Council (2009-2012).
 
He is a recognized expert in well test analysis and has taught numerous well test interpretation industry courses around the world and has been involved in many consulting projects through his companies Well Analysis Limited and Gringarten Consulting Ltd. He has published over one hundred technical papers and was responsible for many advances in well test interpretation, including: the use of Greens functions; the “Gringarten type curves” for wells with wellbore storage and skin, fractured wells, and wells with double porosity behavior; the first major commercial computer- aided interpretation software; single – well and multiwell deconvolution; and a well test interpretation methodology which has become standard in the oil industry. He was also an early pioneer of multidisciplinary studies, both in industry and in academia. His research interests include shale gas and oil, gas condensate and volatile oil reservoirs, fissured fluid-bearing formations, hydraulically fractured wells, horizontal and multilateral wells, high and low enthalpy geothermal energy, Hot Dry Rocks, and radioactive waste disposal.
 
He holds a MSc. and a Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering from Stanford University; and an Engineer degree from Ecole Centrale, Paris, France.