Badrul Mohamed Jan, SPE is currently an associate professor attached to the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Malaya, Malaysia.  He holds a BS, MS and PhD degrees in petroleum engineering from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, USA. He spent almost 10 years in the US and he had the opportunity to work in aworld class research center, Petroleum Recovery Research Centre in New Mexico Tech. He joined the Department of Chemical Engineering, UM as lecturer in 2004. 

The first project successfully executed is related to the use of Dolomite as alternative weighting agent to Barite in drilling fluids. The outcome of the research indicates a promising opportunity to use Dolomite instead of Barite in drilling fluids. Barite is toxic and expensive compared to dolomite, which can be acquired locally.

Dr. Jan first envisions is to develop and link any upstream oil and gas activity to his research. The major project that he accomplished was in the development of Super Light Weight Completion Fluid, (SLWCF) for 3M Asia Pacific. He managed to come out with a discreet formulation for new completion fluid with the use of glass bubbles from 3M. The formulated fluid has been tested in BKC 3 well at Bunga Raya field near Malaysia and Vietnam border. The field belongs to PETRONAS. The outcome of the field test showed nearly 1,000 barrels of additional oil could be produced daily if well is treated with SLWCF. The findings has been presented in SPE conference in Mexico and also published in the Journal of Drilling and Completion.

In addition Dr. Jan has also worked closely with BCI Chemical Sdn  Bhd, a local company mainly formulating and selling oil filed chemicals for various applications such as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Dr. Jan has successfully formulated a novel emulsifier, which is based on palm oil. About 15 ISI journal papers have published from the work.

Dr. Jan has also embarked in making use of industrial waste to improve production of hydrocarbon. In this effort, specific waste from industry has been characterized and extracted for its graphene content. Preliminary work and results indicates as much as 11% of graphene is able to be extracted. Current research is still on going to optimize the extraction process. In addition the extracted graphene will also be added into drilling fluid to investigate the rheological improvement resulting from the addition of the extracted graphene.

Dr Jan next research activities will mainly focus on the use of local dolomite in improving local water quality from a novel “Dolomite Water” system. This new niche area will open up new window of  opportunity for university research to be applied to industry and community.