“Meandering.”
That’s the word this year’s Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award winner, Qinhong “Max” Hu, used when describing the journey he’s taken in the geosciences.
He’s being modest, as the obstacles he’s overcome and the focus he’s exhibited wouldn’t be characterized by a leisurely stroll to the height of his profession.
The Award – given to him for his technical excellence in petrophysics and his integration of a wide array of rock property and fluid flow measurements to characterize nanometer-scale pore systems in unconventional reservoirs commemorates the dedication and passion forged from growing up in a home where the struggle was not to capture dreams, but to survive.
Dreams His Only Luxury
He was born in China in a home with a hard-working civil servant father and, by his own description, an illiterate mother.
“I grew up in a rural southeastern mainland China in the 1960s and ‘70s,” he said.
His father had little education and was an office clerk who worked away from home much of the time. His mother worked occasional jobs in local factories to supplement the family income.
“I had two older sisters, and I still remember the difficulty my parents experienced at the beginning of each school year, trying to find less than $1 to pay the tuition for their children,” said Hu.
Survival was the day-to-day priority, but he had dreams, as a well as work and career, that were analogous to his life, in terms of their exponentially increasing scope.
“In 1982 I became the first college student in my family’s history and boarded my first train ride to the provincial capital 100 miles away to attend college,” he said.
In 1986, he received a science degree from the Zhejiang Agricultural University in China. Three years later and 300 more miles away, he got a master’s degree in environmental soil chemistry from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Then, 7,000 miles away from his home, he received a doctorate in hydrogeology from the University of Arizona in 1995. He then went on to a 10-year stint at Lawrence Berkeley and Livermore National Laboratories.
His work in the heterogeneities in fluid-flow properties of fine-grained rocks is known throughout the industry. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, his research results have significant practical ramifications for explaining the dramatic production decline behavior of many wells in fine-grained rocks.
The key to his success, said past AAPG President Gretchen Gillis, is the innovative experimental and modeling techniques that he developed to link fracture/pore structure to macroscopic fluid flow and chemical transport, focusing on fracturematrix interaction in low-permeability rock after hydraulic fracturing.
From Deep to Deeper
For his part, Hu, who is emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and now chair professor at China University of Petroleum (East China) in Qingdao, said his career can be divided into three phases:
- A focus of soil science and contaminant hydrogeology in the unconsolidated (about 30 meters) subsurface in China and Tucson
- Study of volcanic tuff with natural fractures about 300 meters deep of the Yucca Mountain in Nevada while working in northern California
- Work of hydraulically-stimulated fractures in fine-grained shale at about 3,000 meters in Texas
By appreciating and examining the increasingly tortuous pathways for fluid flow and chemical transport in a variety of geological and engineering porous media along with these three phases, “My work has mostly used experimental methodologies and research philosophies developed from the first two research phases: multidisciplinary approaches, cross-observational scale investigation, mechanistic and processlevel understanding, integration of experimental, modeling and theoretical studies, international collaboration and development of innovative instrumentation along with a utilization of national largescale facilities.”
There was a particular moment that stood out.
“Taking up a faculty position and moving to Texas in the summer of 2008 brought me close to shale work and AAPG as my new professional home,” said Hu.
He said that his “meandering” into the Lone Star State resulted in greater research productivity (“Over 80 percent of my 270- plus SCI papers are published after 2009,” he noted) and the satisfying experience of mentoring more than 220 group members, from postdoctoral researchers to high school students.
As for his own mentoring, he mentions his doctoral adviser at Arizona, Mark Brusseau, who taught him scientific rigor to “massage” data, and his professional collaborator and friend, Toby Ewing, with whom he worked since 1999, in helping to use percolation theory, which is a mathematical framework used to study connectivity in random networks, such as how a fluid moves through a porous material, on his experimental data showing anomalously high tracer presence at the edge of the Yucca Mountain welded tuff and Texas Barnett Shale.
The Joy of Mentorship
The boy from China whose family had to scrounge to start him on this path in the geosciences takes nothing for granted.
“I want to thank AAPG for this extraordinary honor and the opportunity of reflecting on my career in the light of the values embodied by Robert R. Berg: innovative thinking, scientific rigor, dedication to advancing petroleum geology and student education. It strengthens my resolve to pursue impactful research and student mentorship and to serve the profession to the best of my ability in the evolving global energy landscape,” he said.
Hu spoke about receiving the Berg Award as the culmination of all the guidance he’s received and his collaboration with mentors, colleagues, students and research partners who have helped shape his career of the last 40 years.
Hu was awarded the 2018 Distinguished Educator Award of AAPG and said he especially appreciates the joy associated with the mentoring of many students with different backgrounds, with more than half of his nearly 60 postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students teaching in several different countries and 50 master’s students working in the industry.
Even the moments that he calls “torturous” he now looks upon as something special.
“I still remember vividly that we filled up the time sheet by taking three eight-hour shifts a day continuously for a few weeks to operate the laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer, which we used to map out the spatial presence of differently nanosized wettability tracers in solid shale,” he recalled.
How was such a feat possible?
“We achieved it by taking an occasional one-hour nap on two hard chairs in the lab.”