Robert 'Bob' Barba

Robert 'Bob' Barba headshot

Bob has over 40 years of practical experience in the petroleum industry as an openhole wireline engineer, product development manager, petrophysicist, and completion optimization advisor focusing on integrated reservoir characterization studies, completion optimization studies, rock mechanics analysis, and horizontal well field development projects. He has extensive experience in both conventional and organic shale reservoirs.

Bob received the Regional Formation Evaluation Award from the Society of Petroleum Engineers Southwest North America region (Permian Basin) in May of 2018. He served as a Distinguished Lecturer 1995-1996 for the Society of Petroleum Engineers on the optimization of completion designs using petrophysical and reservoir engineering inputs. Bob is a recognized industry authority on refracturing rock mechanics and practices. He delivered the keynote address at a major refracturing conference for the SPE in Calgary January 2016 and has delivered over 100 presentations on the use of refracturing to enhance production in organic shale reservoirs. Bob served as an expert witness on log derived rock properties for BP through Kirkland and Ellis in the Macondo trial. He pioneered techniques to evaluate well performance using production data and routine well log data and applied the concept to over 5,000 wells to date. This significantly improved completion results in those fields.

Most recent projects involve the application of these techniques in Permian organic shale reservoirs where a solid correlation between modeled propped height and production results enables operators to forward model production results from shale reservoirs. Bob has analyzed over 3,000 organic shale wells in the Permian Basin and 400 wells in the Eagle Ford to date. He has also presented SPE 174994 at the 2015 SPE ATCE summarizing the analyses, SPE 195962 at the 2019 ATCE, and URTEC 2662 on organic shale frac and refrac optimization.

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