| Biographical Profile |
Khalid Aziz, Otto N. Miller Professor Emeritus in the Energy Resources Engineering Department at Stanford University, is renowned for his contributions to several aspects of petroleum engineering. In particular he has made important contributions to the flow of complex mixtures in pipes, computer modeling of oil recovery processes (reservoir simulation), and optimization of petroleum field development and field operations. Aziz’ early schooling was in India before the partition of the subcontinent and after 1947 in Pakistan. In 1950, he graduated from a public high school in Karachi, and in 1952 he earned an inter science (pre-engineering) degree from the D.J. Science College, also in Karachi. In August of 1952 he traveled by ship from Karachi to Liverpool, UK, and then from London to New York by plane, arriving in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in September of 1952 to study engineering at the University of Michigan. He enrolled initially in Aeronautical Engineering, but later switched to Mechanical Engineering. He graduated with a BSE degree in 1955.
Aziz’ first engineering job was with Massey-Ferguson in Detroit, Michigan, as a design engineer for farm implements like corn pickers. After about eighteen months of this type of work, he decided to explore petroleum engineering and got a Canadian Government Colombo Plan Scholarship at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In 1958 he received a BSc degree in petroleum engineering as well as the Association of Professional Engineers Gold Medal. With degrees in mechanical engineering and petroleum engineering in hand, he returned to Pakistan and joined the Karachi Gas Company as their distribution engineer and immersed himself in designing and building a gas distribution system for the City of Karachi.
In 1959 he was awarded the Pan American Petroleum Corporation scholarship to do graduate work in the field of multiphase flow in pipes under the direction of the late Dr. G. W. Govier at the University of Alberta. His MSc work dealt with the flow of natural gases in pipes with small amounts of liquids. His experiments and analysis showed that very small amounts of liquids can seriously degrade the performance of gas pipelines. Aziz graduated with a MSc degree in petroleum engineering in 1961 and returned to the Karachi Gas Company in 1962, where he continued to work in planning expansion and implementation of the gas distribution system for the City of Karachi and rose to the position of chief engineer.
In 1960, while Aziz was still a graduate student at the University of Alberta, he was offered a one year teaching position as an instructor in petroleum engineering, which he accepted. As he completed his first year of teaching along with his MSc thesis, the University of Alberta offered him an assistant professorship in petroleum engineering. He accepted this and continued teaching for another year. He returned to Pakistan in 1962 to contemplate the future direction of his career: should he stay in industry or move into academia?
In 1963 Aziz realized that the academic pull was too strong to be ignored. He applied and got accepted in the chemical engineering PhD program at Rice University. He decided to work under the direction of the late Professor J. D. Hellums on the numerical solution of three dimensional Navier-Stokes equation for natural convection in a cavity. He completed his PhD research in the record time of two years and received the Ralf Budd Award for the best thesis of 1965. His PhD research, which was published in The Physics of Fluids in 1967, provided the first three-dimensional solution of Navier-Stokes equation.
By the time Aziz completed his PhD, he had made up his mind to pursue a career in academia rather than return to industry. In 1965 he joined the University of Calgary (at that time the University of Alberta at Calgary) as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering (later the department name was changed to the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering) in their newly established School of Engineering. While in Calgary he continued his research on the flow of complex mixtures in pipes and also initiated research on the numerical solution of multiphase flows in porous media (reservoir simulation). In 1972, Aziz and his colleague, Gary Gregory, developed the first commercial software for the design of multiphase pipeline systems and established Neotechnology Consultants Limited (Neotec). This company turned out to be very successful and was acquired first by the SPT Group of Norway and then by Schlumberger. In the same year Dr. Aziz and Dr. Govier published a book on The Flow of Complex Mixtures in Pipes through the Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. A somewhat updated version of the book has been published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and it is still in print. In 1979 Dr. Aziz and one of his former students, Antonín Settari, published a book through Applied Science Publishers on Petroleum Reservoir Simulation. This book is the most used book in its field and it is also still in print. In 1977, Aziz founded, with the support of the Province of Alberta, the Computer Modeling Group (CMG) as a not-for-profit company to conduct research on the computer modeling of complex oil recovery process. CMG has now evolved into a commercial company (CMGL) and it is one of the major international suppliers of reservoir simulation software. Aziz became a full professor in 1970. He was elected a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada in 1974 and received the Distinguished Service Award of the Petroleum Society of Canada in 1975.
In 1982, Aziz accepted a professorship in the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Stanford University. Soon after arriving at Stanford he started an industrial consortium on reservoir simulation (SUPRI-B). This consortium is still active and widely supported by the international petroleum industry. While at Stanford he has also co-founded successful industrial consortia in smart fields (SFC), horizontal wells (now merged with SFC), and reservoir forecasting (SCRF). He has served as chair of the Department of Petroleum Engineering and as associate dean for research in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford.
In 1989 Aziz was awarded the Otto N. Miller Professorship in Earth Sciences at Stanford University. In 1994 he was awarded the Honorary Professorship of the University of Calgary. Aziz was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (Foreign Member) in 1996. In 2008 he received honorary Doctor of Laws (Honoris Causa) of the University of Calgary for his long service to academia and industry.
In his long career in academia, Aziz has served on the advisory boards of numerous universities and research institutes in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. Since 2004 he has been deeply involved with Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS) in Pakistan. This association started when LUMS asked for his help in planning and starting a new School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE). He has served on the Advisory Board of SBASSE since 2004 and on several other important school committees. In 2018 he was also invited to serve on the University Advisory Board. Seeing SBASSE emerge as a leading research oriented school of the region has been a source of great pride and satisfaction for Aziz.
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