Ahmad Ghassemi

Ahmad Ghassemi is a Rock Mechanics Professor and the McCasland Chair Professor in the Mewbourne School of Petroleum & Geological Engineering, OU. He has Ph.D. in Geological Engineering and specializes in geomechanics for the development of unconventional petroleum and geothermal reservoirs.  He has been working on high-temperature reservoir rock mechanics, hydraulic fracturing, and wellbore stability research and for nearly 30 years with emphasis on analysis and numerical modeling of thermo-poroelastic effects, induced seismicity, and the impact of rock heterogeneity on stimulated reservoir volume.  Currently, he is involved in geomechanics studies of stimulation using experimental and numerical analysis. The experimental works deal with hydraulic stimulation and measuring rock properties under in-situ stress conditions and are part of an overall geomechanics/petrophysics characterization program. The numerical work consists of finite element and boundary element modeling of THM processes in heterogeneous rocks with emphasis on hydraulic stimulation. Other research interests and activity include reactive fluid flow in fractures, and constitutive modeling for chemically-active rocks, geologic-scale rock mechanics e.g., mechanics of magma intrusion and caldera collapse. He has provided reservoir geomechanics courses for petroleum industry.      

    For the past two decades, he has been leading one of the largest academic reservoir rock mechanics groups in the U.S., funded by federal agencies and industry. He was the Chief-Editor for Geothermics, an International Journal for geothermal research in 2010-2014. He has served on several national and international panels dealing with challenges of enhanced geothermal systems development, CO₂ sequestration, and seismicity. In 2012 he received the Geothermal Resources Council Special Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to the modeling of coupled chemical-thermal-mechanical processes and rock-fluid interactions in geothermal reservoirs. He has also served as a Steering Committee member for SPE Forum on Geomechanics, Stimulation & Completions, and as a Panel Leader for the Geomechanics and Geochemistry working group in the Carbon Sequestration-Geothermal Energy Systems Geosciences Workshop; (ii) Team Leader for EPA Hydraulic Fracturing Technical Workshop, Impacts of HF on Natural Transport Systems; (iii) Discussion Leader for the Theory/Modeling Theme, DOE workshop on induced seismicity, Stanford University; (iv) the Technical Organizing Committee of ARMA Hydraulic Fracturing Workshop.  He has published more than 200 technical articles and conference papers on the study of numerical modeling and laboratory testing in geomechanics. He also served on the Scientific Advisory Committee for LabEx Geothermal Project in France and is currently the chair of ARMA Technical Committee on Induced Seismicity.