Aboard stim boat in Sakhalin for stacked frac packs
Jack Charles is an experienced wells engineer with over 20 years of experience split between a major operator and a major service company, understanding the needs of both sides of upstream well delivery. He has worked domestically on land and in deepwater, and worked internationally throughout Asia, Australia, Sakhalin, Trinidad, and North Sea, bringing global knowledge of completions and interventions.
Jack started his oilfield career pigging pipelines in west Louisiana gas fields, before moving on for his degrees at University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Texas A&M in College Station. He spent 10 years with BakerHughes, first in Broussard for sand control and fracturing operations for Texas and Louisiana land, state waters, and deepwater, before spending the next 7 years living in Southeast Asia and supporting eastern hemisphere businesses in a variety of well engineering, operations, business development, and managerial roles. During this time he oversaw multiple firsts, including single-trip multizone frac pack completions in Malaysia, gravel packing with invert emulsions in Thailand, and installing shape-memory polymer screens in Indonesia.
He repatriated to Houston and joined Shell’s Applied Wells Technology group, where he worked for over 10 years providing detailed engineering and operations services for sand control and hydraulically fractured wells globally. He led completions on over 30 complex deepwater and international wells, including first use of a stimulation vessel at Sakhalin for stacked frac packs, and reinvigorated the legacy B.G. assets in Trinidad through shunt-tube gravel packing in ultra-fine reservoirs. He became an SME in sand control, providing global assistance and further advances in sand management at Shell.
Prior to departing Shell and starting his consultancy, Jack focused on standardizing interventions and abandonments by revising and relaunching the global well delivery process. He introduced new engineering and assurance workflows, software tools and dashboards, and created standard procedures for well programs. These advances enabled consistent outcomes for Shell’s interventions and abandonments, avoiding work recycle by gathering and assuring the appropriate data at each design gate, and adhering to well budgets by closely monitoring operations against historical performance.
In addition to providing well engineering in depth and breadth, he is always on the lookout on finding opportunities to improve processes, from creating new software tools for bespoke calculations, to procedure standards for consistent operational performance.
Outside of work, Jack and his wife pursue the creative arts as patrons at the Houston Grand Opera, support local artists at their gallery showings, and plan their next cultural destination to visit. Always tinkering, he also enjoys writing music on guitar and building guitar effects pedals.