Our Vision
The vision of the Crisman Institute for Petroleum Research is to provide a vehicle to enhance development of petroleum engineering technology through cutting-edge, industry-directed research conducted in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University.
The mission of the Crisman Institute for Petroleum Research is to produce significant advances in upstream petroleum engineering technology through the combined efforts of faculty, highly qualified graduate students, in close cooperation with industry.
Optimum Field Development in Shale Oil and Gas Reservoirs
The current focus of the Crisman Institute is our joint project with the Berg-Hughes Center for Petroleum and Sedimentary Systems to build and validate predictive geologic, reservoir and hydraulic fracturing models for improving the development of shale reservoirs using data sets from several shale plays in Texas. The Berg-Hughes Center is comprised of faculty and graduate students in the College of Geoscience. The partnership is an important and unique collaboration between two outstanding educational and research departments at Texas A&M University. We typically have 20-30 ongoing research projects, all involved with shale development, covering topic areas such as geology, geophysics, micro-seismic, nano-pore investigations, core analyses, hydraulic fracturing, and reservoir engineering. A full listing of the projects can be found under the Research tab at the top of the page.
Crisman Institute History
In 1984, the Crisman Institute for Reservoir Management was founded by a private donor endowment by Wayne and Ruby Crisman to further research in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering. The purpose of the Crisman Institute was to get oil and gas companies to bring problems and data to the faculty and students, so both sides could work together to do research on how to build better Reservoir Management plans. In 2004-5, Schlumberger, Halliburton and Chevron each agreed to give a $1 million endowment to Crisman, which was renamed the Crisman Institute for Petroleum Research. In addition, companies were allowed to join Crisman to help the faculty focus on important problems and to provide both data and mentoring to our graduate students. We wanted industry to tell us what problems were of importance to them and to provide data we could use to help solve some of those problems.
In 2015, the Crisman Institute merged efforts with the Berg-Hughes Center (BHC) and will be concentrating on a comprehensive analyses of shale reservoirs so we can develop predictive geologic, hydraulic fracturing and reservoir models.