Robert A. Wattenbarger, P.E.
Professor of Petroleum Engineering

3116 TAMU - 619 Richardson Building

College Station, TX 77843-3116

Phone: (979) 845-0173

e-mail: bob.wattenbarger@pe.tamu.edu

Publications

Course Materials and Other Info

Dr. Robert A. Wattenbarger has more than 35 years' experience in the petroleum industry. Reservoir engineering and computer software have been his specialties, with emphasis on reservoir simulation and well test analysis. He was vice president of Scientific Software Corporation in Denver for 10 years after being involved in the formation of that company.

• Reservoir simulation
• Gas engineering
• Well test analysis
• Thermal recovery

• Dr. Wattenbarger has three main areas of research: gas reservoir engineering emphasizing production and analysis of tight gas reservoirs, paraffin deposition in wellbores and in reservoirs, electromagnetic heating of reservoirs, and well test analysis and well performance, in general. Research in these areas is centered around reservoir simulation techniques and solutions.

• Dr. Wattenbarger's SPE textbook, Gas Reservoir Engineering, co-authored with John Lee, was published in 1996. His recent papers have been in the area of gas reservoir engineering; past papers explored aquifer influence functions with applications mainly to Gulf Coast reservoirs, and real gas well test analysis including the effects of wellbore storage and non-Darcy flow.
• Dr. Wattenbarger has recently published several papers on paraffin deposition in wellbores and in reservoirs. They included using a new reservoir/wellbore simulator to study the effects of solution gas, natural cooling, and artificial heating, making this the first such simulation in the industry. This work was a follow-up of a number of papers that on electrical (or electromagnetic) heating of oil wells, a pioneering technology that has proved to be only marginally economical to date.
• Dr. Wattenbarger has written a number of papers on reservoir simulation. Of particular interest was the industry's first compositional simulator and simulation project on the Carson Creek gas cycling project. This was the first time that comparative cases could be run for full and partial gas cycling, followed by blow-down.

• Halliburton Faculty Fellow - 2003

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