Alain Gringarten

Alain Gringarten is a French petroleum engineer and scientist, born in 1945, who is Professor of Petroleum Engineering and former Director of the Center for Petroleum Studies at Imperial College London. He is known for major advances in well test interpretation, the analysis of pressure data from oil and gas wells. These include the use of Green's functions, the Gringarten type curves for wells with wellbore storage and skin, fractured wells and double porosity reservoirs, early computer-aided interpretation software, and a methodology that became standard in the oil industry. In later years he worked on deconvolution as a well test tool, helping establish a stable least-squares algorithm. He holds two United States patents on determining the characteristics of fluid-producing formations and has received several Society of Petroleum Engineers honours.