Award Winners in Technical and Regional Categories

TECHNICAL AWARD WINNERS!

Alexis Cleckler Regional Reservoir Description and Dynamics

NOMINATOR STATEMENT Operations Engineer with COG Operating LLC in Midland, TX Northern Delaware Basin 2 years. Responsible for the day to day operations including developing procedures and facilitating chemical program for horizontal Bonespring, Avalon, and Wolfcamp wells; optimized and monitored production for various forms of artificial lift including ESP, gas lift, rod pump, flowing, and plunger lift; interfaced with reservoir engineers to help validate forecast and/or type curves; provided detail data to reservoir on LOE; interfaced with land to maintain JOA and lease requirements; interfaced with accounting to help with LOE and capital accruals. NM Shelf 1 year Responsible for day-to-day operations of Paddock and Blinebry horizontal wells; including developing procedures, facilitating chemical program, and identifying optimization opportunities; interface with other operators that COG has working interest with to review AFEs; continue to work with other disciplines including but not limited to land, reservoir, and accounting.

REGIONAL SERVICE AWARD WINNERS!

Quoc Nguyen Regional Distinguished Achievement Award for Petroleum Engineering Faculty

NOMINATOR STATEMENT Dr. Nguyen is a Professor of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. During 2011-2015 he was a Visiting Professor at Rice University. Dr. Nguyen served as the Foundation CMG Industrial Research Chair in Reservoir Engineering from 2010 to 2017. He received a Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering from Delft University. Dr. Nguyen has led the way in the fields of enhanced hydrocarbon recovery, improved well deliverability, and unconventional resources. He has led large projects involving industry partnership and has made some of the most significant advances in conformance control techniques, improved gas and steam flooding efficiency, surfactant flooding, modification of surface energy for enhancing well injectivity and productivity, and gas stimulated shale production. His research in transport phenomena ranged from the microscopic scale intermolecular forces to the megascopic scale numerical reservoir simulators for field-wide modeling. Dr. Nguyen has authored over 220 journal articles and refereed conference papers, and 65 other major publications. He holds six patents deriving from his research. Dr. Nguyen has served on the editorial boards of several key journals. His recent honors include J. H. Herring Centennial Professorship in Petroleum Engineering, the 2017 SPE Distinguished Member award, the 2017 Lester C. Uren award, the 2016 SPE Southwestern North America Region Award for Reservoir Description and Dynamics. Dr. Nguyen has taught and consulted for industry and professional societies worldwide. Dr. Nguyen taught a large required junior level course in petroleum and geosystem engineering (Transport Phenomena in Geosystems) twice per year. He also taught two graduate courses: Advanced Production Engineering and Formation Damage and Well Stimulation. Dr. Nguyen is an excellent teacher. He receives high course ratings and highly positive student comments in every offering. For example, some representative comments are, Professor Nguyen is the best professor I've ever had. I've never had a teacher work so hard and go out their way as much as he has to both encourage me during my struggles and explain every question in full detail, , and I have only ever had positive things to say about Professor Nguyen, and I believe that if I had a different teacher for this class my grade would have suffered significantly. His excellence in teaching has been appropriately recognized in our department by PGE departmental teaching award. Dr. Nguyen is constantly improving. He conducts monthly evaluations for the class to provide him feedback so that he can take corrective actions. For example, one representative student comment, Nguyen is the most caring professor I have had at UT and you can see he really cares about his students . Nguyen creates inclusivity by giving the students ownership of the classroom environment. He readily adapted to the online modality in the pandemic and continued his excellence in teaching without missing a beat.

Mohamed Mehana Regional Young Professional Outstanding Service Award

NOMINATOR STATEMENT Mohamed is exemplary for being a highly-driven individual who enjoys giving back to his community and lending a hand to whoever needs it. He finds ways to be active in his community and be a good citizen wherever he is. His journey starts back in his undergraduate where he used to gather his colleagues to explain complex parts of the course or prepare them for an upcoming exam. While raking first throughout his undergraduate years, he prepared summaries for his colleagues. These summaries helped several students and became a reference for coming students. Moving to the US, Mohamed enjoyed spending his Sunday morning teaching kids Arabic in a local Sunday school. He also used to help his colleagues in the graduate program, sometimes with software he knows, sometimes with brainstorming some ideas, and sometimes with pip talk. Mohamed graduated and moved to Los Alamos National Lab. He participated as a judge at the middle school science fair, where he revived his passion for inspiring others about science. Another remarkable example of his service is being the foreign national liaison in the Los Alamos postdoc association, where he personally made sure that new postdocs were settled in their new home. He also prepared a guidebook for the newcomers. More importantly, Mohamed voiced his colleagues concerns to the management and created communications channels between the foreign postdocs and upper management. Mohamed Mehana is a scientist at the computational earth science group, Los Alamos National Lab. He received his PhD in petroleum engineering from the University of Oklahoma working on multiscale modeling of subsurface phenomena. His research interests include modeling and simulation of transport and interfacial phenomena at the meso/nanoscale, and leveraging machine learning capabilities to enable a predictive scale-bridging and real-time reservoir management.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE WINNERS!