B. Todd Hoffman - Department of Petroleum Engineering

Todd HoffmanDepartment Head
Professor
Petroleum Engineering
NRB 350
Phone: 406-496-4753
Email Todd Hoffman

Biography

Todd Hoffman is a Professor in the Petroleum Engineering Department at the Montana Tech. He teaches classes on Reservoir Simulation, EOR and Reservoir Engineering. Prior to that, he was a reservoir engineering consultant to the oil and gas industry specializing in flow modeling and fractured reservoirs. He was also a petroleum engineering professor at Colorado School of Mines, where he taught courses on Geostatistics, Fluid Properties and Thermal Recovery.

He has over 15 years of combined experience in academia and industry. Todd has worked on reservoir models for more than 30 fields on six continents, and has published over 40 technical papers. His research involves improved recovery for conventional and unconventional oil reservoirs, fracture reservoir modeling and ensuring data consistency while history matching. Todd received his B.S. in petroleum engineering from Montana Tech and his M.S. and his Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from Stanford University.

Research Interests

Recently, most of my research has focused on improving recovery for unconventional oil reservoirs such as Bakken and Niobrara. This has primarily been through numerical modeling efforts, but there has been some experimental work as well. I have worked with some operators to assist in pilot test designs. I would like to continue efforts in this area particularly with field development studies. Additionally, I spend some of my time working on conventional EOR project such as gas injection and thermal recovery. I have also done extensive work on accurately incorporating large-scale parameters in prediction models that have been history matched. I am also developing techniques to represent complex hydraulic fractures more realistically in horizontal and vertical well models.

Career in Brief

  • Assistant Professor. Montana Tech, Butte, MT, (8/14-present)
  • Assistant Professor. Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, (8/11-8/14)
  • Senior Reservoir Engineer. Golder Associates, Seattle, WA (9/09-8/11)
  • Independent Consultant. DRC Consulting, Seattle, WA (6/08-9/09)
  • Assistant Professor. Montana Tech, Butte, MT, (7/05-6/08)

Courses Taught

  • PET 410, Reservoir Simulation
  • PET 544, Advanced Enhanced Oil Recovery
  • PET 499, Senior Design
  • PET 452, Natural Gas Engineering
  • PET 410, Reservoir Simulation

Selected Publications

  • Hoffman, B. T. and Shoaib, S., “CO2 Flooding to Increase Recovery for Unconventional Liquids-Rich Reservoirs”, Journal of Energy Resources and Technology, Volumes 136, Issue 3, September 2013, pages 1-10.
  • Hoffman, B. T., Narr, W.; “Using production logs (PLT) to estimate the size of fracture networks”, Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, Volumes 98–99, November 2012, Pages 11-18.
  • Hoffman, B. T. and Chang, W.M., “Modeling Hydraulic Fractures as Discrete Objects in Finite Difference Simulators: Application to Tight Gas Sands in Montana”, Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, v. 69, Iss. 1-2, pp. 107-116, November 2009.
  • Patent Serial No. 61/162,962 - “A System for Characterizing Fractures in a Subsurface Reservoir.”