Prof. (ret.) Dr. Günter Pusch

Prof. Pusch was born in Leoben, Austria, in 1941 and graduated with honors from the local high school in 1960. He studied petroleum engineering at the Montanuniversität Leoben from 1960 to 1965 and earned his doctorate under Prof. Lorbach and Prof. Schwarz-Bergkampf in 1970 with an experimental thesis on the structure of clay suspensions using surface conductivity measurements, also with honors. His research continued at the Laboratory for Petroleum Production of Deutsche Texaco AG in Wietze, focusing on the application of heat in reservoirs through in-situ combustion. In 1976, he became head of the Reservoir Department at DTA in Hohne, the district where the EOR field trials were conducted. In 1979, he was appointed university professor for the new Department of Reservoir Engineering at the Institute for Deep Drilling Technology and Petroleum Production at Clausthal University of Technology. He served there until his retirement in 2008 as department head and, in a rotating capacity, as institute director (most recently continuously from 1999 to 2007). 

He taught the field of reservoir engineering through the core courses Reservoir Engineering Parts I–III, Tertiary Oil Production Methods, and Fundamentals of Well Testing, supplemented by additional teaching assignments from industry experts (reservoir simulation, PVT properties of hydrocarbons, well testing, underground storage). In 2004, the first English-language Bachelor’s and Master’s program in Petroleum Engineering, which he designed based on the model of Heriot-Watt University, was introduced at Clausthal University of Technology; this program has proven to be the backbone of the institute’s encouraging growth in student enrollment. 

Initially, the research focused on EOR methods (polymer flooding, surfactant flooding, CO₂ mixed-phase flooding, and in-situ combustion). Experimental work on rock cores was elevated to a new level of visualization for flooding experiments through the establishment of one of the first rock tomography laboratories for drill cores (X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance measurements) in Germany. At the same time, the conditions for experiments under stress were established through the construction of a test bench (triaxial permeameter) for deep regions of the Earth’s crust (10,000 meters), and a two-phase flooding facility for experiments under radial stress was set up with peripheral equipment. Powerful analytical capabilities complemented these diverse laboratory facilities. This enabled the execution of numerous research projects, such as on the permeability behavior of “tight gas” reservoirs (DGMK), on carbon dioxide storage in depleted natural gas reservoirs, on gas permeation in salt rocks and granites (BMFT and NAGRA), on the outgassing behavior of hard coal (second-generation coal mining), and water barrier performance in gas reservoirs (EU-funded), among others.
The experimental setup used in numerous flooding tests was also utilized to validate prototype process simulators. This equipment continues to form the core research infrastructure of the department today. This work has resulted in 34 doctoral theses supervised by full-time faculty, over 100 technical publications (see the department’s publication list), and 10 patent applications. 

He was awarded the DGMK’s Carl Zerbe Prize in 1975 for his research on in-situ combustion. He was elected to the European Steering Committee of the EOR Research Symposia (ESIR) and served for many years as vice president of the international Society of Core Analysts (SCA). In collaboration with the Mining Research Institute in Essen, he was elected chairman of the “Second-Generation Coal Mining” research consortium and led its research activities through to a field trial of underground coal gasification in Mol, Belgium. Within EAGE, he contributed to expanding the membership base from its original focus on purely geological and geophysical backgrounds to include engineers. Together with Prof. Rischmüller, Prof. Neumann, and later Prof. Kessel, he established and organized the “Clausthal Chemicals Symposium for Oil and Natural Gas Production” (1982–1995). Internationally, he co-organized numerous conferences of the EAGE, the SPE, and the European “Chemical Societies” and was appointed a member of the “Committee of Mining Sciences” of the Polish Academy of Sciences. 

As dean of the Department of Mining and Raw Materials (1991–1993), he began transforming the traditional mining programs into modern, broader geotechnical engineering programs, some of which are still in place today. For many years, he served as chair of the Senate’s Construction Commission and as the Senate’s representative for cooperation with the Montanuniversität Leoben.