Zoback will present “Producing Natural Gas from Shale Opportunities and Challenges of a Major New Energy Source” at 5:30 p.m. this evening in Sid Richardson Building (SWR) Lecture Hall 1.
His second lecture, titled “Scientific Drilling Into the San Andreas Fault: The SAFOD Experiment,” will be at noon tomorrow, Tuesday, Oct. 25 in Room 139, Tucker Technology Center.
Dr. Zoback is the Benjamin M. Page Professor of Earth Sciences and Geophysics at Stanford University. He is also co-director of the Stanford Rock Physics and Borehole Geophysics Consortium.
Zoback received his Ph.D. in Geophysics from Stanford University in 1975. He was aresearch geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey and chief of the branch of Tectonophysics from 1981-84. He joined Stanford in1984, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including a freshman class titled Sustainability and Collapse. In 1996 he co-founded GeoMechanics International, which is now operating as a subsidiary of Baker Hughes, Inc.
Zoback has authored or co-authored, approximately 250 technical publications, is the author of a textbook titled ReservoirGeomechanics, and has edited several books. He conducts research on situ stress, fault mechanics and reservoir geomechanics at a variety of scales and in different geologic settings.
He was co-principal investigator of SAFOD, the scientific drilling project that drilled and sampled the San Andreas Fault. He and his students are pursuing a number of research projects in reservoir geomechanics especially in regard to production from shale and tight gas reservoirs. He has also extended his research interest to environmental problems such as the geologic sequestration of CO2 and coastal subsidence.
Zoback is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the recipient of the 2006Emil Wiechert Medal of the German Geophysical Society, the co-recipient of the 2006 New Zealand Geophysics Prize and is the 2008 Walter Bucher Medalist of the American Geophysical Union.
Among his many professional activities, Zoback is a member of the Secretary of Energy’s Committee on Shale Gas Development and the NAE Committee investigating the Deepwater Horizon Accident in the Gulf of Mexico. He also currently serves as president of the American Rock Mechanics Association.