Rate My Professor Birol Dindoruk

Birol Dindoruk is the American Association of Drilling Engineers Endowed Professor of Petroleum Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering with a minor in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1992, M.Sc. in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Alabama in 1987, B.Sc. in Petroleum Engineering from the Technical University of Istanbul in 1984, and M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Houston in 2002. Before joining UH as full-time faculty in Fall 2020, he served as an adjunct professor at UH since 1999 and as a consulting professor at Stanford University. Earlier in his career, he held positions at Shell International Exploration & Production as Chief Scientist in Reservoir Physics and Principal Technical Expert in Reservoir Engineering.

His academic interests center on thermodynamics of phase behavior, equation-of-state development, experimental PVT studies, enhanced oil recovery, CO2 sequestration and utilization, multiphase multicomponent displacements in porous media, and hydrogen supply chain challenges. Dr. Dindoruk directs the Interaction of Phase Behavior and Flow Consortium, the Carbon Capture Utilization & Storage Consortium involving over 20 industrial partners, and acts as Principal Investigator for the Center for Low Carbon Energy & Subsurface Engineering at UH. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for contributions to enhanced oil recovery and CO2 sequestration, received the SPE Honorary Membership—the society's highest honor—in 2023, and was named a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors in 2025. Additional honors include the SPE Lester C. Uren Award, Cedric K. Ferguson Medal, and SPE Distinguished Membership. He has served as SPE Distinguished Lecturer, Technical Director for Data Science and Engineering Analytics, and member of the SPE Reservoir Dynamics and Description Technical Discipline Advisory Committee. As Editor-in-Chief of SPE peer-reviewed journals and previously of Elsevier's Journal of Natural Gas Science & Engineering, he has shaped the field's scholarly discourse. Key publications encompass "Hydrogen supply chain and challenges in large-scale LH2 storage and transportation" (2021), "Improved MMP Correlations for CO2 Floods Using Analytical Gas Flooding Theory" (2004), "Analytical theory of combined condensing/vaporizing gas drives" (1993), and "Using propanol as an additive to CO2 for improving CO2 utilization and storage in oil reservoirs" (2022). His research has amassed over 4,900 citations, impacting petroleum reservoir engineering and subsurface energy technologies profoundly.