Casee Lemons
Casee Lemons is part of a team that is using new advanced data science and engineering systems to develop unique insights for the Permian Basin. Lemons, who earned her BS in geology from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and her MS at Baylor University, is making noteworthy contributions to the oil and gas industry.
Accomplishments: Before joining Sourcewater, Lemons was the principal investigator for the TexNet/UT-BEG production and injection analytics program, where she developed the first accurate saltwater disposal stratigraphic charts of the Permian and Fort Worth basins and Eagle Ford play. In this role, Lemons developed a new methodology to evaluate the spatiotemporal evolution of injection and disposal wells’ active depths, stratigraphic landing, and quality control of disposal volumes, wellhead pressures, and changes in permit status. Lemons has subsequently developed automation schemes for these processes while at Sourcewater. In an earlier role at the UT-BEG and Baker Hughes, she conducted integrated geologic characterizations and completions optimization schemes with data mining completions and production.
Earlier achievements include providing geologic expertise to multidisciplinary projects for shale and unconventional reservoirs and working with a team to develop new workflows and techniques for analyzing unconventional reservoirs. Lemons has a patent pending on a process for identifying wellbores, which would economically benefit from the investment of recompletions technologies.
Leadership: Lemons and her colleagues – Sean Smith, who has degrees in physics and environmental engineering, and Bill Mallory, industry geology veteran and data scientist – are the core of the data science team at Sourcewater. Together, they are building completely new data science and engineering systems that gather and analyze data from the Texas Railroad Commission, New Mexico Office of State Engineering, and dozens of other state databases and present them in a meaningful way.
The Sourcewater team recognized that there is very little direct reporting of water-related data for regulatory purposes and that most of what is reported has little value in its original form because it is incomplete, inaccurate and out of date. Their solution for filling the gap is to apply advanced techniques to generate timely, correct and complete intelligence. Together, Lemons and her Sourcewater data science colleagues are developing information that constitute the industry’s only reliable upstream produced water intelligence.
Applying their expertise in geoscience, data engineering and data science, this team is creating new and proprietary methods for cleaning and assuring the quality of collected data, interpreting those data, and presenting them in useful and accessible ways to provide valuable water market intelligence for the upstream oil and gas industry.
Insight: “For about 150 years, geologists have been studying the subsurface to figure out where the oil is and how to get it out,” said Josh Adler, Sourcewater Inc. CEO. “Until now, no one has rigorously studied the subsurface to figure out where to put the water produced with the oil. Casee and her team at Sourcewater are pioneering this new field of saltwater geoscience.”