IRT - In Memory

Mr. Vernon S. Breit (Senior Consultant - Engineering)

We are sad to report that Vernon Breit passed away Monday of heart failure, 14-Oct-2013, after several weeks of fighting various serious medical problems. During the morning Vern had returned to the office after resting at home for a week following his release from the hospital the previous weekend. He looked healthy and was in good spirits. We all spent time with him talking about his future plans and his desire to take up wood working again. He spoke glowingly about how proud he was of his daughters and their achievements. He was also animated as usual about politics and his most recent experiences with the medical system. In the afternoon he went to a normal doctor's appointment and afterward suffered heart failure and could not be revived.

Vern wanted to be cremated. With family having arrived from various out of state locations, a celebratory memorial service was on Friday, 18-October-13 at the Boettcher Mansion in Golden, Colorado from 4 - 8 pm. This was open to all.

We will all remember Vern as a very fun loving colleague who had a wonderful gift of conversation. He would liven up any room with his bold observations and never ending enthusiasm. He was a true entrepreneur and loved the world of business in all its aspects. Vern was technically astute and was a true expert in compositional petroleum reservoir simulation. Clients worldwide regularly sought out his advice on volatile oil, gas injection, miscible gas and EOR projects. He traveled extensively in his profession and his experience ranged worldwide. He loved working with young engineers and teaching his hard won experience to them. Vern was a coauthor of a unique industrial course on petroleum reservoir simulation and dreamed about turning the material into a text book.

Mr. Breit was a reservoir engineer with over 37 years' experience in designing and conducting reservoir engineering and simulation studies in both conventional and EOR areas. His duties in this regard have ranged from writing complete numerical simulation software suites to performing enhanced oil recovery studies and full field simulation studies to managing of simulation software development and maintenance and integrated studies project management.

Mr. Breit's technical expertise included all aspects of performing reservoir engineering studies; from designing studies, developing simulators, planning work schedules and budgets for studies, executing studies, training end users, to presenting study results to management. He was proficient in the use of both VIP and Eclipse simulation software systems and performed simulation studies for clients in Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Russia, China, Indonesia, Malasia, the North Sea, Germany, Libya, and Algeria and all of the major basins of the United States including the north slope of Alaska.

In recent years, he has specialized in whole field compositional simulation studies involving very large grid systems, with initial properties distributed using Geostatistical modeling techniques. As a result of this work Mr. Breit has authored an "integrated studies simulation coarse" that he has taught at over 15 locations world-wide during the past 5 years. The coarse includes sections on geo-cellular modeling, scale-up of properties, PVT and other test data integration into a study, history matching, prediction set-up and execution, and uncertainty analysis of intermediate and final results featuring decision-tree analysis and Monte Carlo simulation techniques.

He was loved and will be remembered by us all.

International Reservoir Technologies, Inc.

Paul T. Bingaman
Nicholas J. Cavaleri
Richard G. Dillon
Eric R. Ding
Joseph A. Dozzo
Deirdre J. Geary-Cordova
Thomas L. Gould
James S. Kalbus
Darrell L. Kramer
Michael T. May
Michael A. Sena
Tami C. Wells