Paul Dudenas, P.E.

Ammonite is pleased to announce that Pennsylvania resident Paul Dudenas has joined Ammonite after his recent retirement as General Manager and Chief Technical Officer for East Management Services, L.P./ JKLM Energy. He has more than 46 years of experience in the U.S and internationally, primarily in the area of reservoir engineering. Paul brings his extensive “hands-on” expertise in unconventional reservoir development to Ammonite as someone who has actually designed, drilled, completed and operated hundreds of horizontal shale wells.

Dudenas began his career with Amoco Production Co. in West Texas, gaining experience in drilling, formation evaluation, production, waterflooding and reservoir engineering. Subsequent Amoco assignments in Houston, Michigan and Pennsylvania followed for 7 years. Afterwards he obtained his M.S. degree while researching the use of pure Penn State dilute surfactants for enhanced oil recovery. He taught Petroleum Engineering at Marietta College for 4 years before spending 13 years working for Saudi Aramco. At Aramco he oversaw development plans for two newly discovered oil fields prior to working in Reservoir Management, focusing on field development optimization at Ghawar, one of the largest oil fields ever discovered.

Paul joined East Resources in 2002 as manager of engineering in East’s Warrendale, Pennsylvania office. Since 2006, he has worked primarily on the exploration, planning and development of unconventional shale resources. He was involved in all aspects of the grass roots development of the Marcellus Shale in northeastern Pennsylvania with East Resources. This included exploration, planning, drilling completing and optimization of all aspects of field development.    Production reached 140 MMCFD from 150 Marcellus wells in some stage of drilling, completion or production. The assets were sold to Shell Oil in 2010 for $4.7 billion. At the time it was the largest transaction in the Appalachian Basin.

In 2011 Paul’s team at East Resources began two additional grass roots shale developments – the Marcellus Shale in northern West Virginia, and the Utica shale in Ohio. After having 60 wells in various stages of drilling, completion or production and producing over 120 MMCFD, these assets were sold to American Energy Partners, (AEP was an Aubrey McClendon company) in 2014 for $1.75 billion.

Paul Dudenas has done extensive evaluation work in other unconventional assets including the Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Bakken, Niobrara, Scoop/Stack and West Texas shale plays. He has worked to mitigate the negative aspects of parent-child well interactions during field development. His knowledge and experience in field development of both conventional and unconventional resources is wide-ranging. While at East Resources/JKLM Energy, Paul managed all of the reserve evaluations for budget and reserve-based lending purposes utilizing the Landmark Aries economic software. He has done extensive individual well rate, reserve forecasting and economic evaluations on many thousands of horizontal unconventional oil and gas wells and also for conventional wells.

Paul taught an industry short course from 2011-2012, titled “Evaluating and Developing Unconventional Shale Resources” for the oil and gas training company PetroSkills. Course material is currently being completed for his “Unconventional Resources Exploration & Development Fundamentals in 2020” course, a more comprehensive and modern version of the course he previously taught. He has presented numerous lectures on Unconventional Oil and Gas Resources for Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University.

Dudenas grew up in Western Pennsylvania, attended The Pennsylvania State University where he obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering. Paul is a registered professional engineer in Pennsylvania.