Paul La Pointe (pictured left) worked at ARCO until 1991 but still completed fractured reservoir projects for the company until it became a subsidiary of BP. He continues to do work that involves old ARCO mates from Plano, Texas, and elsewhere, he says, though not directly for them.
“It is more like I run into ARCO Alumni all the time, such as when we were presenting a fractured reservoir study to Hess last year in Houston,” Paul says. “Who should walk into the meeting as one of the reviewers but Fred Dula, recently hired away from Shell. Fred and I worked in the same group, Structural Geology Research, in Plano for a couple years and in related groups after that.”
Recently, Paul uploaded a new picture to his Arco Alumni profile. While it might look like he’s on a tropical vacation, the trip was actually work-related. “The photo was shot in Papua New Guinea, where I was part of a small field party doing mapping and fracture characterization for InterOil,” he says.
Paul and two other geologists were led by “five guys from a local village who hacked paths through the jungle for us to get to outcrops and collect samples,” he says. The picture shows Paul standing next to an outcrop on a river they reached by paddling in a pirogue. “My field book is showing the orientation of the bedding relative to the fractures,” he says.
The group had a system for traveling through the jungle. “First, we would drop off the locals with their machetes,” Paul says. “They would build a camp out of the jungle in a day or two. Then we would get dropped off by helicopter at the camp.” They usually spotted the outcrops by air or traveled by motorized rowboat or pirogue along the rivers.
Paul’s Papua New Guinea adventure is just one of many services that he and his current employer, Golder Associates, provide to the industry. “[The company’s] FracMan Technology Group is the premier consultancy, we think, in fractured reservoir characterization, static and dynamic modeling,” Paul says.
After joining Golder in 1992, Paul collaborated with two other key players already at the company to develop and commercialize Discrete Fracture Network modeling, a technology that revolutionized the way fractured reservoirs are now modeled, he explains. The fieldwork aspect of his job takes Paul to some interesting places, such as Papua New Guinea, and the Uinta Basin in Utah, where he characterized and made models of tight gas hydro fracturing in the Mesaverde.
“Along with trying to get involved in fieldwork wherever it is possible, which is why one becomes a geologist in the first place, my specialty is the modeling of large fractured carbonate reservoirs,” Paul says. He has built models for Bermudez and the Ku-Maloob-Zaap complex in Mexico; Cupiagua in Colombia; Shaikan in Iraq; Ekofisk in Norway; and many other fields in the Middle East. He also works on issues related to the interaction of the hydro fractures with the natural fracture system in North America, including projects for the Barnett, Marcellus, Niobrara, Horn River and Haynesville formations.
Paul’s home base is Redmond, Wash., one of Golder’s office locations. The company has grown from about 1,100 employees in 1992 to almost 8,000 globally. “Golder operates like a very large law firm … although our legal structure is a corporation, not a partnership,” Paul says. There are senior partners, or principals such as Paul; junior partners, or associates; and others grouped into various practices.
His title is officially Senior Practice Leader of fractured reservoir consulting services worldwide, but Paul says it’s less of a management job and more of a senior consultant position.
0 Comments