Awards & Scholarships

Michael J. Fetkovich is a Phillips Fellow Emeritus, Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville. OK. He earned a BS in petroleum and natural gas engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and the degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences from the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Dr. Fetkovich has spent his entire career with Phillips Petroleum, starting as a gas well test engineer in Dumas, TX through senior principal reserve engineer in Bartlesville.

He was the first to develop and use what is now called "nodal analysis." This work was done for the Hewett Gas field in the UK sector in the North Sea and was later presented at the Tulsa SPE Mid-Continent Section as a continuing education course in well test analysis. His work in decline curve analysis is another example of applying all available information to solve problems; rate vs. time production data is the most abundant type of data available to engineers. The "Fetkovich Type Curve" is the most widely used and referenced tool in papers on this topic; the work is an outgrowth on his earlier work and publications on a simplified approach to water influx calculations.

Dr. Fetkovich is a Distinguished Member of SPE; he has been a Distinguished Lecturer and is a past winner of the Reservoir Engineering Award and the Lester C. Uren Award.