G. Paul Willhite

With more than a half-century of seminal contributions and dedicated service to KU and the engineering industry, Paul Willhite is recognized as a remarkable educator and researcher who served the academic community, university, state, nation and international societies with the utmost distinction.

His career in academia is decorated with extensive service to the department, the School of Engineering, higher education and the petroleum industry. Willhite also helped launch a key initiative to develop a range of improved oil recovery applications that were affordable for independent operators in Kansas and the region. He also authored textbooks that to this day remain the foundational work in petroleum engineering education.

Willhite earned a B.S. in chemical engineering from Iowa State in 1959 and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Northwestern in 1962. He joined the faculty at the KU School of Engineering in 1969 and retired in 2019 as Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering.

In 1962, Willhite began his career as a research scientist in the production research division with Continental Oil Company in Oklahoma, and was promoted to senior research scientist in 1967. He began his 50-year career at KU two years later as associate professor of chemical and petroleum engineering.

In 1974, Willhite founded and co-directed the Tertiary Oil Recovery Project (TORP) with chemical petroleum engineering professor Don Green. The program was designed to acquaint Kansas producers with the technical and economic potential of enhanced recovery methods for oil and gas fields that were affordable for independent operators in Kansas and throughout the region.

A major thrust of the research program was directed at the problem of high rates of water production due to waterflood injected water channeling through high-permeability zones in the reservoir and bypassing oil in zones of lesser permeability. Under Willhite’s guidance, TORP investigated injecting polymers and/or gelled polymers into the reservoir to reduce the permeability of these zones. The research contributed significantly to an understanding of the process and provided information that was important in the design. These polymer systems have been widely used in Kansas, other states and around the world.

Technologies developed by Willhite and Green at TORP were capable of quickly increasing oil production when the U.S. needed incremental oil as the main source of energy. The project also developed a strong outreach/tech-transfer model that later became a role model for other programs across the country.

Willhite remains extremely influential in the field and continues to play a role in the education of petroleum engineers around the globe. He authored or co-authored several books, including two petroleum engineering textbooks — Waterflooding and Enhanced Oil Recovery — that have had a lasting impact on those who have worked in the field since the 1980s. To this day, these textbooks remain foundational to the educational experience of petroleum engineering students at KU and beyond.

In addition to his leadership roles in advancing oil and gas production in Kansas and his influence as a renowned textbook author, Willhite has a lengthy and distinguished record of service to the university and the petroleum engineering field. He has chaired scores of conferences and committees and other events in petroleum engineering at the national level. Of particular note is his service to the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, where he spent more than 25 years as an evaluator mentoring new programs on how to be accredited and evaluating those already accredited.

In the late 2010s, Willhite also took the initiative of remodeling the petroleum engineering laboratory. He spent months purchasing, designing and setting up state-of-the-art experiments that help students understand the fundamentals of the physical phenomena that underly the primary, secondary and tertiary oil recovery processes. He also spent a vast amount of time on improving the methods of writing so students could improve their writing skills.

Willhite was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and is an honorary member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of - American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. He’s in the Legion of Honor and is a winner of the Peer Apart Award from the Society of Petroleum Engineers. He is member of the Iowa State University Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering Alumni Hall of Fame. At KU, he’s a winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award from the KU Center for Teaching Excellence and at the School of Engineering, he’s been named a Bellows Scholar, Miller Scholar and won the Gould Award for Advising.