CURRICULUM VITÆ
PETER ROBERT KING
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: 30/5/57 ABINGDON ENGLAND
PRESENT ADDRESS: Department of Earth Science & Engineering,
Imperial College, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2AZ, UK
Tel: +44 20 7594 7362
FAX: + 44 20 7594 7444
Email: peter.king@imperial.ac.uk
UNIVERSITY: TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 1976 – 1982
NATURAL SCIENCES TRIPOS (PHYSICS) (1976 – 1979) BA Degree awarded 1979
Ph. D. (1979 – 1982) Theory of Condensed Matter Group, Cavendish Laboratory
Supervisors: Prof. Sir Sam Edwards, Dr. R. Buscall (ICI)
S.R.C. CASE award with ICI Corporate Laboratory, Runcorn
Thesis: The Statistical Mechanics of Charged Polymers in Solution (September 1982)
PhD Degree awarded November 1982
PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT:
BP Exploration, Sunbury-on-Thames October 1982-February 2000,
Senior Petroleum Engineer
CURRENT EMPLOYMENT:
Imperial College, London March 2000 – present, Professor or Petroleum Engineering
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS:
Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in the Principles of Engineering
Design, Engineering Department, Cambridge University (1997-present)
Visiting Scholar, Department of Physics, Boston University (1996-present)
Visiting Fellow at Centre for Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Science and
Letters, Oslo (April-June 1993)
Visiting Fellow at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (Sept-Oct 1985)
PROFESSIONAL BODIES:
Fellow of the Institute of Physics (CPhys, CSci from 2005) (elected 1995)
Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (CMath) (elected 1989)
Member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (since 1989)
COMMITTEES & EDITORSHIPS:
Member of the Council of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA)
(1991-1994)
Member of SPE European Editorial Review Committee (1992-5)
Member of Programme Committee of the IMA (1993-8)
Member of Membership Committee of the IMA (1993-present)
Member of Action Committee of the IMA (1994)
Member of EPSRC Physics Review College (1995-present)
Member of EPSRC Condensed Matter Physics Review Committee (1995-1996)
Member of Steering Committee of IOP Theory of Condensed Matter Group
(1995-2002; Chairman 1999-2002)
Member of Steering Committee of IOP Energy Management Group (2001-present)
Member of EPSRC Faraday proposals committee (1997)
Member of EPSRC review of Theoretical Condensed Matter Committee (1997)
Deputy Editor of Petroleum Geosciences (1997-2002)
Member of Cambridge University Engineering Design Centre Steering Committee
(1998-present)
Member of Cambridge University Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering
Subject Group (1999-present)
Chair of International Review Committee of the University of New South Wales, School of Petroleum Engineering (2004)
CONFERENCE ORGANISATION COMMITTEES:
Mathematics of Oil Production, IMA, Cambridge 1987 (Edited proceedings)
Mathematics of Oil Recovery, IMA, Cambridge 1989 (Edited Proceedings)
Modeling Flow in Permeable Media, Gordon Conference 1994
Quantification and Modelling of Spatial Patterns in Permeable Rocks, IMA,
Scarborough 1995 (Chairman of conference)
Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, IOP, York 1996 (Organised Granular
Materials Symposium)
Managing Uncertainty in Development Planning Through Multi-disciplinary
Modelling, SPE, San Raphael, 1997
Modelling Permeable Rocks, IMA, Cambridge 1998 (Chairman of conference)
History Matching, SPE Advanced Technology Workshop, Cambridge, 2000
Modelling Permeable Rocks, IMA, Cambridge, 2001
Modelling Permeable Rocks, IMA, Southampton, 2004
Modelling Permeable Rocks, IMA, Edinburgh, 2007
Complexity in the Oil Industry (COI2007), Natal, Brazil, 2007
RESEARCH RECORD
My research has been centred on the application of advanced methods of statistical physics to practical engineering problems of modelling flow in oil reservoirs. As such it has been widely recognised in the physics and engineering communities. I was employed by BP as a senior petroleum engineer carrying out research in all aspects of oil reservoir modelling and characterisation with particular emphasis on estimating the uncertainty in oil reservoirs and its impact on production decisions. I was instrumental in applying the methods of statistical physics to these problems, both within BP and the industry as a whole.
I pioneered network modelling of the pore scale flow in reservoir rock within BP. In collaboration with others I developed a model which led to an a priori prediction of absolute permeability (Transport in Porous Media, 1993). This became the basis for a standard prediction method used within BP. It was further developed to study the relation of pore structure to absolute permeability and relative permeability and hence the fundamentals of the conventional reservoir engineering equations (Phys Rev A, 1990; Transport in Porous Media, 1991). Earlier the same model had been used to determine the structure of displacement patterns in viscous fingering at a finite viscosity ratio. I was able to show that the patterns were compact with a fractal boundary (J Phys A, 1987; Phys Rev A, 1988). This led to study of the fractal and multi-fractal nature of the growth of viscous fingers and the relationship with diffusion limited aggregation (DLA). This work was the precursor to today’s current research activity in pore scale modelling.
To model geological heterogeneities I developed and applied object modelling techniques (that treated certain types of heterogeneity (like shales or sandbodies) as geometrical objects distributed in space). This was done when mathematical reservoir modelling was in its infancy and had a great influence on the development of the subject (SPE13529, 1985; North Sea Oil and Gas, 1990) and have become routine techniques for practical reservoir engineering.
At Imperial College I have used these methods in conjunction with percolation theory to make very fast estimates of production from such disordered systems (J Stat Phys, 1998; Physica A, 1999) which is currently being applied to business problems. This research is continuing with an industry funded consortium (Phys Rev E 2006, 2003, Petroleum Geoscience 2001, Physica A 1999). This has been a revolution in the way that uncertainty in production can be predicted for real fields, reducing the work of many days to a few seconds.
An alternative approach to the purely statistical modelling of geologically complex systems is to model the physics of the sedimentary process that deposited them. I was closely involved in experimental and theoretical work at Boston University (Nature, 1997) which led to an important discovery in pattern formation in granular systems (quoted as the, “top physics discovery of 1997” in the periodical Discover Jan 1998). We have recently begun to investigate an entropic characterisation of pore space topology as a way to understand the basics of fluid flow in porous media and the relationships between different macroscopic properties (proceedings of CMWR XVI, Copenhagen, 2006 http://proceedings.cmwr-xvi.org/getFile.py/access?contribId=0&resId=0&materialId=paper&confId=a051)
I investigated a number of ways for calculating the effective flow properties in these heterogeneous systems (J Phys A, 1987). In particular I developed the real space renormalization approach to rescale absolute and relative permeability (Transport in Porous Media, 1989 & 1993). In this method the effective permeability for a fine grid representation is mapped onto a coarser grid. This process is repeated until a single “effective” property value is achieved. This technique has proved to be a very fast and accurate method of estimating effective permeability for fine grid representations of reservoir heterogeneity. It has been successfully applied to a number of real reservoir studies and is becoming one of the standard techniques adopted in commercial software. At Imperial College I have continued to develop these applications of statistical physics to upscaling (Computational Geosciences, 2002). In addition we are developing new techniques for upscaling using wavelets (Transport in Porous Media, 2007).
More recently I examined problems to do with choice of optimal production strategies in the presence of sub-surface uncertainty. In a particular North Sea study of a cluster of fields I used simulated annealing and later (in conjunction with the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) genetic algorithms to determine the optimal production strategy for the cluster (SPEJ, 1998). The models covered a number of disciplines from subsurface description, through facilities to economics. In doing this we determined a production strategy that added 50% to the net present value over that of the base case determined by more conventional approaches. This work was continued with many applications internally in BP which have not been published for commercial reasons. This was a major innovation in the way business units assessed their production strategies.
This research has been recognised in both the physics community (Fellowship of the Institutes of Physics and Mathematics, election as a Visiting Scholar in the Physics Department at Boston University) as well as the petroleum industry (membership of SPE review panels, invitations to international meetings such as the Gordon Conferences). This work has also been applied to groundwater pollution modelling. In recognition of this I was part of an expert panel reviewing the technical aspects of Nyrex’s geological modelling for the Sellafield nuclear waste repository.
I was elected to a Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professorship in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University. With this I have been able to help develop research and teaching in subsurface aspects of petroleum engineering within the Department
KEY PAPERS
Pancaldi, V, Christensen, K, King, PR, Permeability up-scaling using Haar wavelets, Transport in Porous Media, 2007, Vol: 67, Pages: 395 – 412,
Tavassoli, Z, Carter, JN, King, PR, An analysis of history matching errors, Comp Geosci, 2005, Vol: 9, Pages: 99 – 123
Lopez, E, Buldyrev, SV, Dokholyan, NV, Goldmakher, L, Havlin, S, King, PR, Stanley, HE, Postbreakthrough behavior in flow through porous media, Phys Rev E, 2003
King, PR, Buldyrev, SV, Dokholyan, NV, Havlin, S, Lopez, E, Paul, G, Stanley, HE, Using percolation theory to predict oil field performance, Physica A, 2002, Vol: 314,103 – 108
King, PR, Neuweiler, I, Probability upscaling, Comp Geosci, 2002, Vol: 6, 101 – 114
Makse,H.A., Havlin,S., King,P.R., Stanley,H.E., Spontaneous Stratification in Granular Mixtures, Nature, 1997, Vol: 386, Pages: 379 – 382 (cited 135 times)
Bryant,S.L., King,P.R., Mellor,D.W., Network model evaluation of permeability and spatial correlation in a real random sphere packing, Transport Porous Media, 1993, 11, 53 – 70 (cited 60 times)
King,P.R., Muggeridge,A.H., Price,W.G., Renormalization calculations of immiscible flow, Transport in Porous Media, 1993, Vol: 12, Pages: 237 – 260 (cited 51 times)
Blunt,M.J., King,P.R., Relative permeabilities from pore scale network modelling, Transport in Porous Media, 1991, Vol: 6, Pages: 407 – 433
Blunt,M.J., King,P.R., Macroscopic parameters from simulations of pore scale flow, Physical Review A, 1990, Vol: 42, Pages: 4780 – 4787
King,P.R., The use of renormalization for calculating effective permeability, Transport in Porous Media, 1989, Vol: 4, Pages: 37 – 58 (cited 138 times)
King,P.R., The fractal nature of viscous fingering in porous media, J Phys A, 1987, 20, L529 – L534 (cited 43 times)
King,P.R., The use of field theoretic methods for the study of flow in a heterogeneous porous medium, Journal of Physics A, 1987, Vol: 20, Pages: 3935 – 3947 (cited 54 times)
