Lara Heister & t!Ps’ Areas of Expertise

Lara Heister joined This is Petroleum Systems LLC in April 2020. Lara is an integrator and innovator in geoscience with 25 years of combined academic and industry experience.

She’s applied her background in geochemistry and petroleum systems to global deep-water and onshore plays to address frontier to production level questions. Lara believes that companies can use their existing data most efficiently through integration of observations from numerous disciplines such as geochemistry, basin modeling, mud logging, reservoir engineering, and petrophysics. She also has a deep passion for mentoring and teaching that was cultivated as a visiting professor at numerous universities. She linked her passions in industry through informal and formal mentoring/teaching via development of courses and workshops and also creation risking matrices for petroleum systems for Anadarko Petroleum Company.

• Her masters and PhD at Arizona State University, Stanford University, and University of California, Davis focused on the integration of inorganic geochemistry, rift tectonics, mantle modeling, and field work in Denmark, Iceland, and central East Greenland.
• Her research scientist position at University of Texas at Austin yielded a successful NSF grant to purchase state of the art equipment for the Jackson School of Geoscience. She also served as committee member for graduate students and co-taught a graduate level analytical course. Missing teaching, she took 2 successive temporary faculty positions where she developed new courses and advised numerous student thesis projects.
• She accepted a position at ExxonMobil and worked in development and exploration before joining the Upstream Research Center as a 3D basin modeler, supporting business units across the portfolio including Nigeria, GOM, Brazil, and numerous plays in in the Middle East (including Jordan, Syria, Iraq/Kurdistan, and Saudi Arabia)
• She then accepted a position as a geochemist at BHP Billiton where she worked with Andy Pepper to develop an internal source rock fundamentals course while also supporting the business units petroleum systems needs.
• Finally, she accepted a position at Anadarko Petroleum Company where she aided in the safe drilling of >120 deep water wells and developed an industry leading advanced mud gas interpretation workflow. She also lead the crafting of the corporation’s source rock play element methodology and taught numerous workshops on various applications of geochemistry and petroleum systems. In addition to working all deep water assets (GOM, Colombia, New Zealand, West/East Africa, Peru, and new ventures), she also supported all onshore assets (Permian, DJ Basin, Powder, and new ventures) in exploration and development phases.
• While working shale and hybrid plays, she lead the internal application of numerous innovative techniques including the use of diamondoids, time lapse geochemistry/allocation workflows, and calculations of original generative hydrocarbon potential. She also collaborated with Andy Pepper and Stephanie Perry to generate improved workflows to accurately estimate the mobile-immobile fractions of formation fluids.