‘The Guad Father’ Says Goodbye

Kerans Retires After Remarkable 40-Year Career at UT

By Monica Kortsha 

It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning in April, and cars are whizzing by on the highway near Austin’s 360 Bridge. On the side of the road, about 25 geology students from the Jackson School of Geosciences are studying the limestone cliffs that line the highway.    

The spot may be busy now, but in the early Cretaceous? There wasn’t much going on here at all, save for the slow piling up of carbonate material at the bottom of a shallow sea. That’s exactly why Professor Charlie Kerans brought his GEO 420K: Introduction to Field and Stratigraphic Methods class here.  

The steady buildup of sediment over millions of years left behind a solid limestone deposit that persisted even as the sea went away. When the Capital of Texas Highway cut through the rock, it revealed a slice of geologic history.  

“It’s a good place to learn,” Kerans said, standing with a hammer in hand to nail up magnified photos of rock samples onto the outcrop so students could more clearly see the sediment grains. “[The rock is] all grey. But the story is all in the details.”  

Kerans, one of the foremost carbonate geologists in the world, has made a career of reading the details in rock. At UT, he taught hundreds of others to do the same, leading field trips in Texas and around the world for industry groups, geological societies, and Jackson School students alike. 

But the local roadcut is an old favorite. Kerans has been coming here since the 1980s, around the time he started at The University of Texas at Austin as a research associate at the Bureau of Economic Geology. That makes the outcrop a fitting stop for his last field trip as a UT professor.  

Kerans officially retired in August, closing out 40 years of research, teaching and countless hours in the field as a UT professor and researcher.  

“Getting people out there, that’s one of the things that I feel passionate about,” Kerans said. “Just getting people out to see the geology in the field has always been a motivating thing for me.” 

Kerans spent his first 20 years here at the Bureau of Economic Geology, where he rose in the ranks to senior research scientist and the principal investigator of the bureau’s Reservoir Characterization Research Laboratory (RCRL). He spent the next 20 as the Robert K. Goldhammer Chair of Carbonate Geology at the Jackson School’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where he shifted gears toward prioritizing teaching and advising students. He also served as department chair from 2016–2020.   

Kerans maintained close research ties with his bureau colleagues and industry collaborators.  

“This integration between academia and industry that Charlie has established throughout his career is unique and widely recognized around the world,” said Ted Playton, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees working with Kerans (M.S. 2003, Ph.D. 2008), and is now a geologist at Chevron.  

“He’s a world-class geologist,” said Playton. “He’s worked with everyone, he knows everyone. His deep insights and extensive knowledge enable him to solve complex industry problems through understanding and characterization of the geology.” 

Kerans got to know industry geologists closely through the RCRL, one of the bureau’s oldest research consortia. The program was started in 1987 and has run continuously since then thanks to support from member companies. 

Consortia membership allows companies first access to research findings and researcher insight. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Kerans’ research on the outcrops in the Guadalupe Mountains (or “Guads”) of West Texas and New Mexico shed new light on the subsurface environment of the Permian Basin, one of the world’s most productive oil and gas fields. The mountains rim the northwest edge of the basin. Kerans’ research provided information that helped boost the recovery of oil and gas from the basin’s carbonate reservoirs, said Scott Tinker, the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology from 2000-2024.   

“Charlie was a pioneer working these big canyon walls as analogs for subsurface production,” said Tinker, who got to know Kerans when Scott was a research geologist for Marathon Oil in the 1990s, and a member of the RCRL consortium. “Charlie’s work understanding big wall sequence stratigraphy was cutting edge and provided the two-dimensional architecture needed to model and characterize oil and gas fields and enhance production. Kerans and Tinker would later publish a book together called “Carbonate Reservoir Characterization,” which was a best-seller in its field.  

Pat Welch, the past president of the West Texas Geological Society, personally told Kerans that his research, along with that of colleagues at the bureau, shaped the trajectory of production in the Permian Basin.   

“I feel I can speak for the West Texas Geological Society membership when I say that without the efforts of the [Bureau of Economic Geology] we would not be nearly as far along in the development of the oil and gas resources of the Permian Basin,” Welch wrote to Kerans in an email.  

Kerans’ research has earned him multiple awards from professional geological associations. This includes the Society for Sedimentary Geology’s Francis J. Pettijohn Award (2015) for excellence in sedimentology, and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award (2022). It’s also led to a nickname from his students that’s an honor all its own: “The Guad Father.”  

Starting in about 2008, Kerans has expanded his research from the West Texas desert to a more tropical locale: the Bahamas. While the Guads preserve the remnants of an ancient Permian reef from 270 million years ago, the Bahamas and nearby Turks and Caicos Islands preserve reef geology that is much more recent, about 120,000 years old. This paleo-reef co-exists alongside modern-day corals and shoreline deposits. In addition to deploying drones and LIDAR to capture large swaths of geology — a method that Kerans has been refining at field sites for years — Kerans’ outings now involve suiting up in scuba gear to explore underwater formations. The research is providing details about the recent history of sea-level rise in the region, and the role of the landscape in affecting that rise. The findings have relevance to how contemporary sea-level rise may play out on shorelines across the world.  

“If whoever sees the most rock wins, there is no one close to Charlie,” Tinker said. 

Kerans got to know industry geologists closely through the RCRL, one of the bureau’s oldest research consortia. The program was started in 1987 and has run continuously since then thanks to support from member companies. 

Consortia membership allows companies first access to research findings and researcher insight. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Kerans’ research on the outcrops in the Guadalupe Mountains (or “Guads”) of West Texas and New Mexico shed new light on the subsurface environment of the Permian Basin, one of the world’s most productive oil and gas fields. The mountains rim the northwest edge of the basin. Kerans’ research provided information that helped boost the recovery of oil and gas from the basin’s carbonate reservoirs, said Scott Tinker, the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology from 2000-2024.   

“Charlie was a pioneer working these big canyon walls as analogs for subsurface production,” said Tinker, who got to know Kerans when Scott was a research geologist for Marathon Oil in the 1990s, and a member of the RCRL consortium. “Charlie’s work understanding big wall sequence stratigraphy was cutting edge and provided the two-dimensional architecture needed to model and characterize oil and gas fields and enhance production. Kerans and Tinker would later publish a book together called “Carbonate Reservoir Characterization,” which was a best-seller in its field.  

Pat Welch, the past president of the West Texas Geological Society, personally told Kerans that his research, along with that of colleagues at the bureau, shaped the trajectory of production in the Permian Basin.   

“I feel I can speak for the West Texas Geological Society membership when I say that without the efforts of the [Bureau of Economic Geology] we would not be nearly as far along in the development of the oil and gas resources of the Permian Basin,” Welch wrote to Kerans in an email.  

Kerans’ research has earned him multiple awards from professional geological associations. This includes the Society for Sedimentary Geology’s Francis J. Pettijohn Award (2015) for excellence in sedimentology, and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award (2022). It’s also led to a nickname from his students that’s an honor all its own: “The Guad Father.”  

Starting in about 2008, Kerans has expanded his research from the West Texas desert to a more tropical locale: the Bahamas. While the Guads preserve the remnants of an ancient Permian reef from 270 million years ago, the Bahamas and nearby Turks and Caicos Islands preserve reef geology that is much more recent, about 120,000 years old. This paleo-reef co-exists alongside modern-day corals and shoreline deposits. In addition to deploying drones and LIDAR to capture large swaths of geology — a method that Kerans has been refining at field sites for years — Kerans’ outings now involve suiting up in scuba gear to explore underwater formations. The research is providing details about the recent history of sea-level rise in the region, and the role of the landscape in affecting that rise. The findings have relevance to how contemporary sea-level rise may play out on shorelines across the world.  

“If whoever sees the most rock wins, there is no one close to Charlie,” Tinker said. 

Kyle Fouke earned his doctoral degree in 2025 and conducted his thesis research on Turks and Caicos. But he accompanied Kerans to a range of field sites, including the Guads and Sacramento Mountains. He said his years with Kerans has taught him the value of learning in the field. 

“You get out there, you show up, and look at the rock.” he said. “Although computer models offer valuable information, Charlie has shown me the rock record and getting your nose on the rock is where the most important information lies.”   

According to Kerans, being able to spend so much of his career the field — and the experiences that stem from that — has been a reward all its own.  

“It’s epic,” he said reflecting on the field work that’s been at the heart of his career. “l always kid my petroleum engineering friends: What stories can you tell? ‘I had a rough time at the golf course’ or something? For a geologist, we have adventures built into things.”  

What’s the next adventure for Kerans? He plans on keeping up his research part time, consulting, and doing more scuba diving. He said he is also looking forward to spending time in the great indoors of the bureau’s core repository digging into sample boxes and describing core.  

Read more about Professor Charlie Kerans and his adventures in the field in the upcoming 2025 edition of the Jackson School’s Newsletter.  

To make a gift in honor of Charlie, contact Andrew West: awest@jsg.utexas.edu.