Claude E. Cooke Jr., SPE, passed away on 17 January 2024. He was 94. His career included more than 70 years’ experience in the industry specializing in drilling, cementing, hydraulic fracturing, oil recovery processes, and cased-hole logging. In 2006, he was named an SPE Legend of Hydraulic Fracturing. Throughout his career, he held over 30 patents and published technical papers in the fields of hydraulic fracturing, cementing, and other technologies related to oil and gas production.
After earning his law degree in 1974, he concentrated on technical aspects of litigation focusing on patent preparation, patent prosecution, trademarks, and trade secret protection. In 2005, he founded Cooke Law Firm in Conroe, Texas, where he specialized in intellectual property law representing clients in the oil and gas industry and other technology clients in the semiconductor, electronics, and chemical industries.
Prior to starting his own firm, he was a consultant for Arthur D. Little in oil industry technology planning and management and served as a litigation expert. Later, he practiced intellectual property law in the firm of Baker Botts LLP.
Before his work as an attorney, Cooke worked as a scientist for Exxon Production Research (now ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company) in Houston, where he performed and directed research in a broad range of technologies related to drilling and production from 1954 to 1986. Prior to that, he completed a year of postdoctoral research at Columbia University.
During his undergraduate career, he was employed by Magnolia Petroleum Company in its research laboratories near Dallas for four summers.
During his time at ExxonMobil, he and two colleagues were named as inventors on a 1978 patent for a “hydraulic fracturing method using sintered bauxite propping agent.” This proppant was first introduced to the industry in 1977 in an SPE technical paper. The invention led to him being known as the “father of ceramic proppants.”
He served on CARBO’s Board of Directors for 13 years before retiring from the position in 2010.
CARBO’s LinkedIn tribute to Cooke said, “During his lifetime, Cooke carried around a pair of pliers in his briefcase, which he affectionately referred to as his ‘API pliers’ in tribute to the American Petroleum Institute. He would challenge people to crush one of the particles of bauxite proppants, proving their inability to do so, while the other proppants would crush easily.” Cooke was also responsible for creating the “Cooke Conductivity Cell.”
In 1985, Cooke received the Outstanding Inventor Award from the Houston Intellectual Property Law Association for three inventions related to the oil and gas industry. In 2016, he was elected to the “Fluids Hall of Fame” by the American Association of Drilling Engineers, and in 2017 he was named as the Distinguished Alumnus in Physics by Louisiana Tech University. In 2021, he published a book Thanks for the Lift: Autobiography of an Oilfield Kid which recounts his upbringing as the son of an oilfield worker, his education, and work experience.
He held a BS from Louisiana Tech University, a PhD in physics from the University of Texas, and JD from the University of Houston Law Center.