About

Mark Zoback

Senior Executive Advisor

Mark Zoback is the Benjamin M. Page Professor of Geophysics and the Director of the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative at Stanford University.

He co-directs SCITS Stanford Center for Induced and Triggered Seismicity (SCITS) and the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage (SCCS). Dr. Zoback conducts research on in situ stress, fault mechanics, and reservoir geomechanics. He is the author/co-author of over 300 technical papers, holder of five patents and author of two books. Reservoir Geomechanics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 is now it’s 15th printing. His online course, also entitled Reservoir Geomechanics, has been completed by over 10,000 students around the world.

Mark’s book, Unconventional Reservoir Geomechanics, written with Arjun Kohli, was released by Cambridge Press in April, 2019. Dr. Zoback has received a number of awards and honors, including the 2008 Walter H. Bucher Medal of the American Geophysical Union. In 2011 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and in 2012 was elected to Honorary Membership of the Society of Exploration Geophysics. He was the 2013 recipient of the Louis Néel Medal of the European Geosciences Union and named an Einstein Chair Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2015 he received the Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award of the AAPG and in 2016 received the Outstanding Contribution to the Public Understanding of the Geosciences Award from the American Geological Institute.

Mark's posts

Digesting the Bonkers, Incredible, Off-the-Charts, Spectacular Results from the Fervo and FORGE Enhanced Geothermal Projects

I’m out of superlatives – I used them all up in the title. But seriously – Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) projects have had a really, really good summer. In this article, I summarize the results that have been recently presented by Fervo and FORGE. At their annual Tech Day and in a white paper posted this week (Norbeck et al., 2024), Fervo Energy provided their first update on Project Cape, a Utah project where they are developing 400 MWe of new production over the next two years. So far, fourteen wells have been drilled, and three of them have been stimulated.

Read more

What ‘company culture’ means to us

We recently held our annual company retreat. This is an important event because we are a fully remote company, and it gives us the chance to get together in-person and spend quality time. This year, we did the retreat in Houston, following URTeC and our annual symposium. We visited Space Center Houston, went to an Astros game, and ate BBQ and Tex-Mex. As a Houston native, I picked some of my favorite things to do in town! We also held a meeting on ‘company culture.’ I asked the group – how do you perceive our company culture? What do we do well, and what could we do better? Here are the highlights.

Read more

Meet the ResFrac team

Learn why both independents and supermajors trust ResFrac

Search