New Director for the Chevron Basin Modeling Center of Excellence

Jul 31, 2017

The Chevron Basin Modeling Center of Research Excellence (CBM-CoRE) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Mauro Becker as the new Director. The CBM-CoRE is part of the Berg-Hughes Center for Petroleum and Sedimentary Systems.

Dr. Becker brings three decades of scientific and technologic experience in the petroleum industry, where he had the opportunity to develop in geologic operation, research, teaching and managerial positions most of the time for the Brazilian NOC Petrobras. He worked onshore and offshore in Brazilian basins and the Gulf of Mexico, in Business Units and Corporate Head Quarters as well as at the Company’s Corporate University and its Research Center. Dr. Becker holds a Doctorate Degree in geology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Andrea Miceli-Romero is a new research professor for the center’s team. Dr. Miceli-Romero likewise comes from the petroleum industry and has a Doctorate Degree in organic geochemistry and petroleum system analysis at the University of Oklahoma. She has research interests in petroleum systems analysis, organic geochemistry, and basin modeling of unconventional resources.

In 2013, Chevron funded a research and teaching center of excellence in the Berg-Hughes Center, focused on basin modeling. The multi-year graduate program has been developing next-generation basin modelers and advancing research in petroleum system and basin analysis and modeling. Research focus is on the understanding, modelling and simulating of the fundamental controls in the generation, retention and expulsion, migration and accumulation of hydrocarbons in Unconventional and Hybrid Systems from source to trap, in a variety of basin settings and play types, such as the Lower Permian in the Delaware Basin, West Texas.

Equipped with state-of-art hardware and software, the Center uses industry-standard modeling software platforms to integrate data from production, petroleum engineering, organic and inorganic geochemistry, rock-fluid interactions, fluid properties, tectonics, sedimentology, geophysics, petrophysics, and stratigraphy to perform basin and petroleum systems analyses, modeling and simulation. The Chevron Basin Modeling Center supports five graduate candidate students working in areas as diverse as organic-inorganic geochemistry, seismic signals, gravimetry - magnetometry, petroleum systems modeling and simulation (mass balance) and petroleum engineering with direct application to the objective of the Center.

Nowadays, as the petroleum industry faces great economic hardships, advanced scientific and technologic innovations as well as graduate professionals, such as the ones under development in the CBM-CoRE, can make a great difference in the effectiveness of current and future exploration and production projects.