UWs Dejam Collaborates with Corva on Real

Assistant Professor Morteza Dejam, of the University of Wyoming College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Petroleum Engineering, is collaborating with an oil and gas analytics company on a research project to solve the most complex hydraulic fracturing operations.

The research is intended to enable oil and gas companies to optimize completion design and reduce costs.

In the collaboration with Corva, Dejam and his research group plan to diagnose real-time fracturing data in order to derive hydraulic fracturing efficiency and accurately characterize fracture networks and on-site evaluation of multistage fracturing design. The expected outcomes will provide the extensive support for engineers to quickly analyze and respond immediately during a fracturing operation.

Funding for the first phase of the project amounts to $192,984, including matching dollars from the College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Corva is the leader in real-time drilling and completion analytics for oil and gas. With Corva’s platform, customers and vendors can develop powerful apps and dashboards that facilitate and improve quality during drilling and completion operations through real-time insights and analytics. Corva’s platform is deployed on more than 200 rigs with customers that include 25 of the largest publicly traded oil and gas producers.

Dejam began teaching at UW in May 2017. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar and a sessional instructor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Calgary. He has one year of industrial work experience with the National Iranian South Oil Co. as a reservoir studies engineer. In addition, he taught petroleum engineering courses at the Azad University of Omidieh for five semesters.

His area of research is theoretical and experimental studies of transport phenomena in porous media, with focuses on shear dispersion in double-porosity systems; block-to-block interaction processes in fractured porous media; geological storage of carbon dioxide; fluid flow and transport in shale and tight rocks; phase equilibria of confined fluids in nanopores; and enhanced oil recovery in sandstone and carbonate formations. He has studied these subjects using cutting-edge experimental and analytical/numerical modeling techniques, which resulted in several journal articles and conference papers.

Dejam obtained his doctoral, master’s and bachelor’s degrees in petroleum engineering from the University of Calgary, Sharif University of Technology and Petroleum University of Technology in 2016, 2009 and 2007, respectively.