The UC Oil Consortium® was established at the University of California at Berkeley by Prof. T. W. Patzek in 1994.  Over the years, the participants have been Aera Energy, BP, CalResources, Chevron USA, Mobil USA, Statoil, Shell Development, Shell Western E&P and Unocal.  

Current members are Chevron and Phillips Petroleum. The UC Oil Consortium basic annual fee is $60K/year.

UC Oil is divided into several sections: 

• Reservoir engineering and control, and Electronic Core Lab development are led by Prof. T. W. Patzek  

• Hydrofracturing, fracture propagation, rock damage accumulation is led by Prof. Barenblatt

• Rock-fluid wettability studies are under Prof. Clayton Radke

• Rock imaging laboratory is led by Dr. Liviu Tomutsa  

• Rock mechanics laboratory is led Prof. S. Glaser  

At mega scale, UC Oil has done research in reservoir surveillance and characterization, hydrofracture imaging, control of fluid injection using smart process-based controllers, tiltmeters and inSAR satellite images.  

At core scale, UC Oil has done research on imaging microstructure of porous media, development of depositional models, development of quasi static pore network simulator of drainage and imbibition and dynamic simulator of drainage.