Development and identity of the profession



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Petroleum engineering

PE is involved in the exploration and production activities of petroleum as an upstream end of the energy sector. Upstream refers to the process of finding and extracting oil, which is usually buried deep beneath the earth's surface, to provide a continuous supply to consumers "downstream". Petroleum engineering covers a wide range of topics, including economics, geology, geochemistry, geomechanics, geophysics, oil drilling, geopolitics, knowledge management, seismology, tectonics, thermodynamics, well logging, well completion, oil and gas production, reservoir development, and pipelines.

Overview

Petroleum engineering has become a technical profession that involves extracting oil in increasingly difficult situations as the "low hanging fruit" of the world's oil fields are found and depleted. Improvements in computer modeling, materials and the application of statistics, probability analysis, and new technologies like horizontal drilling and enhanced oil recovery, have drastically improved the toolbox of the petroleum engineer in recent decades.

As mistakes may be measured in millions of dollars, petroleum engineers are held to a high standard. Deepwater operations can arguably be compared to space travel in terms of technical challenges. Arctic conditions and conditions of extreme heat have to be contended with. High Temperature and High Pressure (HTHP) environments that have become increasingly commonplace in today's operations require the petroleum engineer to be savvy in topics as wide ranging as thermohydraulics, geomechanics, and intelligent systems.

Petroleum engineers must implement high technology plans with the use of manpower, highly coordinated and often in dangerous conditions. The drilling rig crew and machines they use become the remote partner of the petroleum engineer in implementing every drilling program. Understanding and accounting for the issues and communication challenges of building these teams remain just as vital to the petroleum engineer as ever.

The Society of Petroleum Engineers is the largest professional society for petroleum engineers and publishes much information concerning the industry. Petroleum engineering education is available at 17 universities in the United States and many more throughout the world - primarily in oil producing states - but not only top producers, and some oil companies have considerable in house petroleum engineering training classes.

Petroleum engineers have historically been one of the highest paid engineering disciplines; this is offset by a tendency for mass layoffs when oil prices decline. According to a survey published in Dec 2006 the average income was $116,834.

Types

Petroleum engineers divide themselves into several types:

  • Reservoir engineers work to optimize production of oil and gas via proper well placement, production levels, and enhanced oil recovery techniques.
  • Drilling engineers manage the technical aspects of drilling both production and injection wells.
  • Production engineers (also known as completion or subsurface engineers) manage the interface between the reservoir and the well, including perforations, sand control, artificial lift, downhole flow control, and downhole monitoring equipment.

Reservoir engineering is a branch of petroleum engineering, typically concerned with maximizing the economic recovery of hydrocarbons from the subsurface.

Of particular interest to reservoir engineers is generating accurate reserves estimates for use in financial reporting to the SEC and other regulatory bodies. Other job responsibilities include numerical reservoir modeling, production forecasting, well testing, well drilling and workover planning, economic modeling, and PVT analysis of reservoir fluids.

Reservoir engineers also play a central role in field development planning, recommending appropriate and cost effective reservoir depletion schemes such as waterflooding or gas injection to maximize hydrocarbon recovery. //

Reservoir engineers often specialize in two areas:

  • Surveillance (or production) engineering, i.e. monitoring of existing fields and optimization of production and injection rates. Surveillance engineers typically use analytical and empirical techniques to perform their work, including decline curve analysis, material balance modeling, and inflow/outflow analysis.
  • Simulation modeling, i.e. the conduct of reservoir simulation studies to determine optimal development plans for oil and gas reservoirs.

Almost any person with a basic or advanced degree in a pure or applied science can undergo on the job training to become a reservoir engineer, which normally takes five to ten years, although some universities in the USA, Europe, and around the world do offer specialized undergraduate and graduate degrees in petroleum engineering.

Drilling engineering is a subset of petroleum engineering, involved in the design and drilling of production and injection wells.

The planning phases of drilling an oil well typically involve estimating the value of sought reserves, estimating the costs to access reserves, acquiring property by a mineral lease, a geologic survey, a wellbore plan, and a layout of the type of equipment depth of the well.

Drilling engineers are engineers in charge of the process of planning and drilling oil wells. Their responsiblies include:

  • Designing casing strings in conjunction with drilling fluid plans to prevent blowouts (uncontrolled hydrocarbon release) and formation breakdown.
  • Designing or contributing to the design of drill strings, cement plans, directional plans, and bit programs.
  • Specifying equipment, material and ratings and grades to be used in the drilling process.
  • Providing techincal support and audit during the drilling process.
  • Performing cost estimates and analysis
  • Developing contracts with vendors

It is their responsibility to ensure that the well is drilled in a safe, cost-effective, and effective manner.

Drilling engineers are often degreed as petroleum engineers, although they may have experience as a field hand or as another disciplined engineer, geologist, or mudlogger (i.e., mechanical engineer or petroleum geologist) and subsequently trained by an oil and gas company.

 


Historical Prospective

Origins of the profession

 

Petroleum engineering was recognized as a new and separate field of practice during the first 2 decades of the last century. The name is an acknowledgement that the primary practitioners of the profession were those engaged in the business of producing petroleum. As the volume of drilling activity grew, professionals were attracted to it frm other fields of engineering and science, and its transition from a craft to an engineering profession got under way. The identification of a separate profession can be marked as occurring about one-half century after Drake drilled for oil.

 

Development and identity of the profession

The stages of petroleum engineering can be identified as cut-and-try (before 1915), measurement and correlation (1915-35), analysis and synthesis (1935-65) and systemization (post 1965). A better understanding of the profession’s development can be derived from considering how its various functions unfolded. Until the 1930’s, petroleum engineering centered on the drilling, completing and producing activities associated with individual wells. Improvements in technology took place through activities to upgrade specific techniques and methods in these arenas; to use better materials; to standardize equipment; to measure distances, directions, pressures, temperatures and formation variances within the wellbore; to recover and analyze core samples and samples of produced fluids; and to control the loss of energies from the natural gas and water that accompanied oil production.

During the 1930s, the primary emphasis on production from the individual well gave way to the recognition that the characteristics of the oil reservoir had to be taken into consideration. Leading companies established working groups for reservoir engineering and the topic began to appear as an item in petroleum engineering curricula.

The focus on reservoir engineering accelerated establishment of petroleum industry research laboratories. Major research attention was directed toward the principles, processes and methods for improvement of oil recovery that included waterflooding; high-pressure-gas injection; miscible processes; use of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and other gases; and development of surfactants.  The consideration of reservoirs as complex flow systems also brought into play the importance of measuring reservoir characteristics and of producing both physical and mathematical models. This expansion and growth of reservoir engineering principles and their successful applications in may producing situations offered petroleum engineering a new identity and a better way in which the profession could be differentiated from other branches of engineering.

During the past decades, consolidation and integration of four major lelements of petroleum engineering have occupied the profession. The following lists these elements:

1. extending the capabilities to gain access to, to couple and to operate within a greater portion of the subsurface environment (offsore locatins, acidizing, hydrofracturing,etc);

2. developing methods for detailed characterization of subsurface formations, their fluids and their surroundings (well logging, geophysical measurements, etc);

3. recovering a greater proportion of the petroleum within reservoirs that have been accessed and understanding the transfer operations that accompany the recovery (phased fluid-injection programs horizontal wells, etc);

4. systematizing technological management and coupling it with business decision making ( risk analysis, reservoir management, etc).

 


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