Mark
McClure

The Engineer Who Ran the Numbers on Everything - Then Started Over

There is a moment in most academic careers when the research calendar fills up and the hard questions stop. Mark McClure hit that moment at the University of Texas at Austin, looked at the gap between what subsurface physics could theoretically model and what oilfield operators were actually using to make billion-dollar completion decisions, and decided the gap was too absurd to accept. In 2015, he left the faculty and co-founded ResFrac.

The problem was specific. Hydraulic fracturing - the process of pumping fluid at pressure into rock to crack it open and release oil or gas - had been practiced commercially for decades, but the simulation software industry had largely punted on the hard physics. Operators relied on tools that made simplifying assumptions so aggressive they bordered on fictional. McClure's doctoral work at Stanford had spent three years doing the opposite: coupling fluid flow, geomechanics, and fracture propagation into unified models that actually behaved like rock. The question was whether the industry would pay for rigor.

It turns out, it would. ResFrac launched commercially in 2018 backed by Altira Group, and within a few years was embedded in the completion workflows of more than 60 exploration and production companies across North America's major unconventional plays. Operators in the Permian Basin, the Bakken, and the Eagle Ford started running McClure's physics before they ran their frac jobs.

Getting the Physics Right - Not Just Right Enough

McClure's research record reads differently from most oil & gas software CEOs. His most-cited paper - "An investigation of stimulation mechanisms in Enhanced Geothermal Systems," published in 2014 - has been cited over 600 times and became foundational literature for an entirely different industry: geothermal energy. A paper about cracking hot deep rock with injected water, written by a petroleum engineer at Stanford, is now standard reading for geothermal developers in Utah and Iceland alike.

That cross-domain relevance wasn't accidental. McClure's framework treats the subsurface as a unified physical system: fluid pressure, stress, friction, fracture, heat. Whether the fluid is carrying proppant to prop open a shale fracture or carrying water to extract geothermal heat from basement rock, the equations don't change. The insight that drove his academic career drives his company's product roadmap.

His work on Diagnostic Fracture Injection Tests - the short pump tests operators use to characterize reservoir properties before a full frac job - challenged methods that had been industry standard for years. His reinterpretation of DFIT pressure transients showed that conventional analysis techniques were misreading the signals, and the software he built reflects the corrected physics. It is not a comfortable position for a startup CEO to publicly tell an industry that its standard practices are wrong. McClure did it anyway, in peer-reviewed papers, and let the citations accumulate.

ResFrac: Where "Better Fracs" Is a Physics Problem

ResFrac's tagline - "Better fracs. Better wells. Better returns." - lands differently when you know the CEO has a peer-reviewed body of work explaining exactly what "better" means at the molecular physics level. The software runs integrated hydraulic fracture and reservoir simulation, meaning it models the fracturing event and the production lifetime in a single coupled system. That integration is harder to build than two separate tools stitched together, which is why most of the industry hadn't done it.

The company launched commercially in Palo Alto in 2018, which made it slightly unusual: a petroleum engineering software company with a Silicon Valley address, 36 employees, and a CEO who still shows up at SPE technical conferences with new research. By 2020, it had raised a second round from Altira Group and shipped a significantly rebuilt user interface. By 2026, it had attracted a platform investment from Banneker Partners, an institutional investor that called ResFrac "a leader in advancing the future of subsurface simulation." Institutional language, but the underlying validation was real.

The company's advisory board includes Dr. Thomas Finkbeiner of KAUST, and its COO Garrett Fowler was named an SPE Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024. The team around McClure reflects his academic instincts: rigor in, rigor out. Even the internal culture has a phrase for it - "We reserve the right to get smarter."

The Fracture Expert Who Sees Geothermal in the Rock

McClure sits on the advisory board of Fervo Energy, the geothermal startup that achieved a historic milestone with Project Red - demonstrating that horizontal well drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques from shale oil could unlock commercial-scale geothermal power. The connection makes obvious sense once you understand his research history: his 2014 paper on Enhanced Geothermal Systems stimulation mechanisms is one of the most-cited technical references in the emerging industry.

He also serves on the advisory committee for LabEx G-eau-thermie Profonde at the University of Strasbourg - France's deep geothermal research program - and participated in the Science and Technology Analysis Team for the US DOE's FORGE geothermal project in Utah. In practice, this means the same fracture physics that helps a Permian Basin operator design a better completion is also informing how the United States extracts heat from granite three kilometers underground.