Tim Dean
Tim Dean received a Bachelors degree in geology with honors from Knox College in 1975 and attended graduate school at the University of Arizona in geophysics. He began his career with Seismograph Service Corporation doing borehole seismic work and helped to introduce Vertical Seismic Profiling to the U.S. market. Tim started his own company, Vertical Seismic Services in Ventura, California in 1981, and then merged with a borehole seismic startup in Houston called Differential Seismology Inc. where he was the Vice President of Operations.
In 1984 and he joined Champlin Petroleum in their Geophysical Technology Group. At Champlin, later Union Pacific Resources, Tim developed VSP inversion methods for predicting offshore geopressure and developed software and methods for surface seismic inversion, including new techniques for pay thickness estimation.
He also did extensive work on applying Amplitude Versus Offset (AVO) seismic methods for the analysis of gas prospects. He was given the assignment of being the first geophysicist in the promising Austin Chalk horizontal drilling play in 1989 and developed innovative seismic workstation interpretation methods that accurately predicted production results.
Tim conceived and developed a horizontal well geosteering method using geometrical projection of MWD gamma ray data. This method has been applied on thousands of horizontal wells and had a significant impact on the success and efficiency of the horizontal drilling method. Since 1992, Tim has been working as an independent consultant primarily involved in horizontal drilling in the petroleum business.
With the recent advent of horizontal drilling in the Barnett Shale, he has applied his experience in analyzing hundreds of horizontal wells to elucidate the surprising structural complexities of this vast new resource.