Prof. Hans-Georg Graf, Ph.D. (Eng.)

After three years as a soldier in the Great War, primarily on the Eastern Front as far as Stalingrad, and most recently as a lieutenant and company commander in the Panzergrenadiers, Hans-Georg Graf moved from his home in the eastern Harz foothills to the Western Harz in the fall of 1945 at the age of 21. There he applied to the Mining Authority in Clausthal as a mining apprentice. During his subsequent mining training, Professor Graf suffered a severe hand injury that forced him to give up playing the violin, which he loved so much. During that time, Hans-Georg Graf made nightly border crossings in the Eckertal valley, heading east and back. These were primarily to visit his childhood sweetheart, whom Hans-Georg Graf married in the spring of 1951 and was able to bring over to Steimbke in the Nienburg district that fall.
With his characteristic determination and independence, Hans-Georg Graf completed his mining studies in 1950 after nine semesters, earning his diploma, and joined the Brigitta union in January 1951. After a year of training, Hans-Georg Graf became a supervisor and team leader and was responsible for the Steimbke and Suderbruch fields as a production engineer. In addition, however, Hans-Georg Graf was and remains an ingenious and experimental person. He was therefore eager to take on the task when, in 1954, he was assigned to establish and lead a technical planning department. His first publications and lectures date from the creative years that followed; after initially focusing on oil field design issues, they rapidly shifted to the challenges of natural gas extraction with the onset of the natural gas era in the mid-1960s. In line with the rapidly growing importance of field development, Hans-Georg was granted authority in 1967 to oversee the planning and construction of production and extraction facilities for the Brigitta and Elwerath unions; and when, in 1970, the Brigitta and Elwerath unions transferred their activities to the newly founded BEB Brigitta and Elwerath Operations Management Company, his responsibilities expanded to include heading the Planning and Construction Division.
In 1973, he was appointed head of the Operations Division at BEB, a prominent position as "commander" of over 1,400 employees, two company-owned and four or more contract drilling rigs, and eight production districts where nearly 1.5 million tons of crude oil and approximately 12 billion cubic meters of natural gas are produced annually—districts that encompass sour gas operations and sweet gas production as well as steam flooding, brine treatment, and superfracs.
Hans-Georg Graf’s field of activity was the technologically and operationally outstanding development of the large natural gas fields in the South Oldenburg and Hanover regions, and in particular the extensive sour gas deposits. His development work formed the basis for the practice of natural gas drying at the production well, the design of large parts of the North German natural gas transportation system—including its sophisticated process computer technology for regulation and control from individual wells to transmission lines—and, finally, the complex subsurface equipment for high-pressure sour gas production wells.
Hans-Georg Graf has willingly shared his experiences and insights with the professional community in more than 35 publications, such as his 1968 paper on “Technical Dynamics and Economic Consequences in Natural Gas Transportation,” in 1975 in a paper presented at the World Petroleum Congress in Tokyo on the “Technical and Economic Criteria for Oil and Gas Field Automation,” and in 1982—a product of his many years of managerial experience—on “Reliability, Availability, and Safety in Oil and Natural Gas Production.”
In the late 1960s, Hans-Georg Graf translated his concepts for process-controlled natural gas transport into a scientific framework and earned his doctorate in January 1970 from the Technical University with the thesis "Development of Methods and a Process Computer Program for the Short-Term Economic Adjustment of Production to Demand while Simultaneously Mitigating Load Peaks in a Remotely Monitored and Controlled Natural Gas Transmission Pipeline System."
This newly established connection to Clausthal intensified in the following years, and in the summer semester of 1976, Dr. Graf was appointed to the Institute for Deep Drilling Technology, Oil and Natural Gas Production at Clausthal University of Technology with a teaching assignment on “Equipment and Operation of Natural Gas Fields.” Around the same time, he assumed the chairmanship of the board of the mining school association "Deutsche Bohrmeisterschule in Celle e.V.," a position he held until 1982. His additional role as a member of the Technical Advisory Board of the Economic Association for Oil and Natural Gas Production (WEG) since 1973 rounds out the scope of his responsibilities, within which Hans-Georg Graf has deliberately dedicated himself not only to the advancement of technology and science, but also to the people involved in these fields—and especially to young people.
On August 19, 1980, the Lower Saxony Minister of Arts and Sciences, at the request of the Faculty of Mining, Metallurgy, and Mechanical Engineering, appointed Dr.-Ing. Hans-Georg Graf as an honorary professor in recognition of his services to teaching and research at Clausthal University of Technology.
At the age of 60, he retired from active service at BEB.

Excerpted from the laudatory address delivered by Prof. Dr.-Ing. H. C. Runge on the occasion of the honorary colloquium marking the 60th birthday of Prof. Dr.-Ing. H.-G. Graf