USC researchers and Chevron oil production engineers and business planners gathered Feb. 28-March 1 to take stock of more than three years of cooperation and plan their next steps, including two “grand challenges.”

USC Viterbi School of Engineering Dean Yannis Yortsos and Vice Provost for Research Advancement Randolph Hall welcomed the collaborators to USC for the CiSoft Forum, an annual event. Don Paul, the Chevron chief technology officer, took part in the proceedings via telephone.

CiSoft, the Chevron-funded Center for Interactive Smart Oil Field Technology, will celebrate its fourth birthday in July. Co-directed from its beginning by Chevron's Mike Hauser and USC chemical engineering professor Iraj Ershaghi, it now has approximately 25 Chevron professionals working directly with 21 USC Viterbi faculty members and 31 graduate students in 10 study/attack areas.

All USC researchers are members of the USC Viterbi School – the Daniel Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Electrical Engineering and the USC Information Sciences Institute.

Hauser, manager of the Chevron Global Upstream i-field Program, said that his company’s support for the CiSoft program was solid. “Our commitment is to a long-term relationship, which we don’t do with every university.”

He added that he expected the first actual prototype uses of technology to be in the field before the end of 2007. Among the projects in development, he singled out initiatives to use enhanced analysis of real-time information about oilfield conditions as the one most likely to quickly pay the largest benefits.

Hauser said that CiSoft participation increasingly involved technical personnel in addition to managers responsible for production.

Chevron senior counsel Steve Christian, who attended the first day of the forum, noted that the oil industry had various challenges due to the enormous capital investments in the industry and the attendant need to carefully manage risks associated with the introduction of new designs and products.

Christian also touted the CiSoft program as a successful example of a technology-leveraging partnership that permits Chevron to diversify its research and development while expanding its internal capabilities. “We have high expectations for the CiSoft program,” he said.

Hall said CiSoft was unique at USC in the degree of industry/university partnership leading to the unification of research and “putting it into practice.” He contrasted the CiSoft model with the more traditional pattern of universities that take part in a government-funded study and then “hope for a use.”

The grand challenges announced at the meeting involve a new CiSoft approach regarding two oilfields: One is a long-exploited “brown field,” where, as Hauser noted, “all the easy stuff has already been tried” and the problem is to find new ways to extract an increasingly scarce resource.

The other is a “green field,” an area where oil is believed to exist in exploitable quantity. The challenge here is to design, in deep detail, exactly how to best get the maximum from the field, using best practices from the start.

Chevron leaders and researchers received extensive amounts of data about the two fields in question, with the aim of creating a real-world plan.

Ershaghi said that graduate students can benefit from the CiSoft research and educational programs. The smart oilfield educational degrees offered through the USC Viterbi Distance Education, he added, are making progress in training the next generation of hybrid petroleum engineers to manage an integrated operation of smart oilfields.