Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 160
OCR for page 161
AZIZ S. ODEH
1 925-1 994
WRITTEN BY ROBERT F. HEINEMANN
CONTRIBUTIONS BY RAFI AL HUSSAINY, D. KRISHNA
BABU, AND EVE S. SPRUNT
SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY
AZIZ S. ODEH, one of the worId's foremost petroleum engi-
neers and retired senior scientist of Mobil Research and
Development Corporation, died on July 16, 1994, in Plano,
Texas, after an extended illness.
Aziz Odeh was born in Nazareth, Palestine, on December 10,
1925. He moved to the United States in 1947 to attend the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, where he received a B.S. in
engineering in 1951. Dr. Odeh earned his M.S. from the Univer-
sity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1953 and then began
employment with Magnolia Petroleum Company, which was in-
corporated into Mobil. He took a leave of absence in 1955 to
pursue his Ph.D. at UCLA and received his degree in 1959. Dr.
Ocleh next worked as a reservoir engineer with Mobil Oil cle
Venezuela until 1961, when he transferred to the Field Research
Laboratory of Mobil Research and Development Corporation.
He advanced through a number of technical positions before he
became manager of reservoir engineering in 1978. While manag-
ing and directing research, Dr. Odeh maintained his technical
activity, which was recognized in 1980 when Mobil namer! him
senior scientist, the company's most prestigious technical posi-
tion. Dr. Odeh was inducted into the National Academy of
Engineering in 1987. He retired from Mobil in 1989 but contin-
ued to work as a consultant to Mobil and a number of other
organizations until his death.
i6
OCR for page 162
162
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Aziz Odeh exhibited a deep respect for the fundamentals
of physics, chemistry and engineering th ~ t
, 1 ~-
~J ~ ~ OSAKA ~_AAAA~ I-A1CLI is rarely associated
W1tn one working in the petroleum industry. This defining
quality undoubtedly was nurtured by his early work on the
effect of viscosity ratio on relative permeability, for which he
received his doctorate. However, Dr. Odeh was also a pragmat-
ic engineer, as evidenced by his landmark paper "Material
Balance on Equation of a Straight Line," which he coauthored
with Dave Havalena while working in Venezuela. This paper
quickly became a petroleum engineering standard and is still
used by virtually every petroleum engineer in its original form
to determine the size, future performance, recovery mecha-
nism, and aquifer geometry of the world's oil and gas
reservoirs. It also contained the scientific qualities that be-
came synonymous with Dr. Odeh's publications using
mathematics to describe a physical system and to generate
results with such clarity and uniformity that a certain elegance
was apparent to the practicing engineer.
An. .. .
A ~ O
~ nese quarries were certainly evident in his large number of
papers that advanced the state of the art of well t~ctincr no
Odeh's research on variable rate testing and partial penetrations
and completions is recognized as a cornerstone of this technolo-
gy, which is used to predict well performance and measure a
A ~ ~ A ~ ~ ~ AN In_ ~ BAA 45 ~ ~ A
A ~ ~ ~A A ~V ~^ A_
reservoir's physical properties. He also published an important
body of work in well testing, which focused on non-Newtonian
flow, fractural systems, wellbore damage, and nonlinear testing
that is widely used in petroleum engineering.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Odeh became interested in numeri
_ _ 1 · · ~ . - ~
cat reservoir simulation. Before that time, engineering analysis
used electric analogs of physical models. These analog models
were used to evaluate well patterns by sampling electric cur-
rents at various locations in the model and equating them to
pressure potentials and fluid flow rates. With the explosion of
digital computing in the 1970s and the 108()~ the n`~trmif~lim
. ~.
~ ~ MA A ~ r - -^ ~ ~ ~ By. . .
engineer began using discretized approximations of reservoirs
based on Darcy's Law and the usual continuity equations. The
resulting set of nonlinear equations and the corresponding
accuracy and stability of their solution would challenge petro-
leum technology for many years as simulation requirements
OCR for page 163
AZIZ S. ODEH
163
became increasingly more complex. Dr. Odeh championed
the development and use of the most complete and difficult
algorithms-fully implicit linearizations with strongly coupled
well representations-within his development group at Mobil.
These techniques were at first considered to be too time con-
suming to be practical. However, as increasing computer
power made them more palatable, their numerical stability
became so attractive to practicing engineers that these algo-
rithms became the standard in Mobil's portfolio of black oil,
compositional, and thermal simulators as well as most com-
mercial products in the marketplace.
Dr. Odeh constantly worried about the proper application
of these tools. "Understanding of fundamentals is enlighten-
ing; the black box mentality is dangerous," he would often
lecture to his peers and colleagues. However, he helped pio-
neer the use of the technology to develop major hydrocarbon
resources in the North Sea, Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Reservoir simulators were used to determine realistically the
facility and platform requirements, the number of wells to be
drilled, and the predicted production rates and economic lim-
its of a myriad of different oil and gas fields. The success of
these applications helped make reservoir simulation a stan-
dard too] of petroleum engineering.
The development and application of reservoir simulation
dominated Dr. Odeh's focus through the mid-l9SOs. At this
point, and then through his retirement years, he turned his
attention to horizontal wells. While attending a conference in
the MicldIe East, he correctly predicted that horizontal wells
were to be the dominant tools of of! production technology in
the coming years. He then began research to predict and de-
scribe mathematically the performance of horizontal wells.
The work resulted in an extremely complicated equation for
computing the well's productivity. The real brilliance of this
work (like his early work on material balance) was Dr. Ocleh's
reduction to a simple and easy-to-use expression similar to
that for vertical wells. Again, the simplicity and elegance of
this work made it an industry standard almost immediately.
This body of work brought the number of papers that Dr.
Odeh authored and coauthored to more than fifty.
OCR for page 164
164
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
In addition to his induction into the National Academy of
Engineering, Dr. Odeh received a number of other awards
and recognitions. He began his active involvement in the Soci-
ety of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in 1960 and received its
prestigious John Franklin CarI] Award in 1984. He was elected
an SPE Distinguishecl Member in l9SS and was given the Out-
standing Achievement Award from the Dallas SPE Section in
1989. Aziz was fiercely proud of his heritage and worked clili-
gently to establish the SPE in the Middle East. He was a
member of the board of directors of the Abu Dhabi National
Reservoir Research Founclation until 1989. He also was an ad-
viser to the Ministry of Oil in Qatar, Mexican Petroleum
Institute, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Oil Services Com-
pany of Iran, and Saudi Aramco. Dr. Odeh received an
honorary appointment as consulting professor at Stanford
University in 1988. He was also listed in American Men and
Women of Science and Wlao's Who in Engineering en cl received
News Circle magazine's Man of the Year Award in 1990.
Equally as important as his technical and professional ac-
complishments were Aziz's human qualities. He was
completely devoted to his family. He was also a passionate
tennis player. He was a teacher at heart who taught and lec-
tured at universities, industry schools, and Mobil courses his
entire career. Aziz delighted in passing on his knowledge and
enthusiasm for petroleum engineering to younger people and
was a guiding influence in the careers of many engineers. Aziz
probably summed this up the best in a 1988 International
Mobil interview where he said, "My greatest accomplishment
is the young people. I brought them in from universities and
trained them. They rose to the challenge." I am honored and
humbler! to have been one of those young people.
-
OCR for page 165
Representative terms from entire chapter:
reservoir simulation
