OREANDA-NEWS. April 10, 2013. Zeid Al Ghareeb, a Saudi Aramco sponsored student pursuing a Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been awarded a Seed Fund grant of USD150,000 for doctoral research from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

The proposed research was endorsed by founding and sustaining members of MITEI, including Saudi Aramco, BP, Shell, Schlumberger and Chevron, among many others.

Al Ghareeb was recognized for his research titled “Optimum Decision Making in Reservoir Management Using Reduced-Order Models.” Al Ghareeb’s research focuses on broadening the application of oil reservoir simulation for decision making in light of geological, operational and financial uncertainties using fast, physics-based reduced-order models.

“I am extremely honored to be receiving the MIT Energy Initiative Award for Doctoral Research,” said Al Ghareeb. “I am grateful for the recognition I have received for my research from the founding and sustaining members of MITEI.

“Earning this award was not just because of my sole effort, and so I would like to thank my colleagues at the Reservoir Description and Simulation Department and Aramco Services Co. for all the support shown and the help given.”

The award will help in tackling real world problems. Applications of reservoir simulation and optimization are generally computationally intensive, and having state-of-the-art high performance computers will definitely increase the company’s computational capability.

Incorporating operational and financial models with geologic models throughout the decision-making framework is not common, according to Al Ghareeb, and will require collaboration with energy economists, engineers and geologists.

This multidisciplinary approach to reservoir simulation and management is expected to include seminars and summits through MITEI to address this challenge and emphasize the effect of coupling these models in the reservoir optimization and decision-making process.

The goal is to make this process educational to engineers and scientists, and attractive to energy economists.

“Zeid’s award is an outstanding recognition of the caliber of his work and reflects well on all of our sponsored students, both in North America and globally,” said Moutaz Mashhour, ASC manager of Industrial Relations.

ASC is currently hosting more than a 1,000 company sponsored students in North America, providing academic mentoring to ensure the success of the program and that the company’s professionals are fully prepared to guide the company into the future.

A recent memorandum of understanding between Saudi Aramco and MIT will help expand the partnership between the school and the company, and includes research encompassing renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy economics, CO2 management and conversion, desalination, advanced materials and a range of hydrocarbon production areas, such as computational reservoir modeling and simulation, geophysics and unconventional gas.