Thermal Recovery

• Improve confidence in critical decisions with structured, easy-to-follow coverage.
• Use the material as a practical reference when reviewing procedures and best practices.

• Reservoir engineers
• Production engineers
• Process engineers
• Facilities engineers
• Students

Mike Prats worked continuously for or with Shell Oil Company Affiliates from June 1, 1948 until his retirement on February 1, 1989. Most of his professional career was with Shell Research Laboratories in the U.S. and The Netherlands, emphasizing work in support of operations. He holds a BS degree (with honors 1949) and an MA degree (1951), both in physics, from the University of Texas at Austin. During his 40 years with Shell, Prats used experimental, theoretical, and numerical approaches. In addition to thermal recovery processes (his main field of interest), areas of emphasis included displacement processes, hydraulic fracturing, reservoir characterization, unconventional raw materials (such as coal and oil shale), and reservoir compaction. Prats holds more than 30 patents, most of them related to oil-recovery techniques, including one for the recovery of oil from tar sands by a steam-injection technique that was the basis for the project at Peace River, Alberta, Canada. His monograph on Thermal Recovery, published by SPE in 1982 (also translated into Spanish), still serves as a text in petroleum engineering. In the early 1980s, Prats did preliminary feasibility analysis (in The Hague) for waterflooding a chalk reservoir in the North Sea, was Senior Reservoir Engineering Advisor and later Manager, Special Reservoir Engineering Studies, to MARAVEN S.A. (in Caracas) before returning to the U.S. in early 1984 to support Shell s thermal operations in California, especially those in the South Belridge Field. Prats is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences; a corresponding member of the Mexican National Academy of Engineering; an Honorary Member of SPE and AIME; and a recipient of the 1974 SPE Lester C. Uren Award, the 1993 Anthony F. Lucas Gold Medal, and the Thermal Recovery Distinguished Achievement Award. Prats is a past Director and Senior Technical Editor for SPE, an SPE Enhanced Oil Recovery Pioneer, and president of a small consulting Firm. In the past, he has been a member of the faculty in the petroleum engineering departments at both the University of Texas (Austin) and Stanford University.