Petroleum engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the subsurface activities related to the production of hydrocarbons, which can be either crude oil or natural gas. These activities are deemed to fall within the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry, which are the activities of finding and producing hydrocarbons. (Refining and distribution to a market are referred to as the downstream sector.) Exploration, by earth scientists, and petroleum engineering are the oil and gas industry's two main subsurface disciplines, which focus on maximizing economic recovery of hydrocarbons from subsurface reservoirs. Petroleum geology and geophysics focus on provision of a static description of the hydrocarbon reservoir rock, while petroleum engineering focuses on estimation of the recoverable volume of this resource using a detailed understanding of the physical behavior of oil, water and gas within porous rock at very high pressure.
The combined efforts of geologists and petroleum engineers throughout the life of a hydrocarbon accumulation determine the way in which a reservoir is developed and depleted, and usually they have the highest impact on field economics. Petroleum engineering requires a good knowledge of many other related disciplines, such as geophysics, petroleum geology, formation evaluation (well logging), drilling, economics, reservoir simulation, well engineering, artificial lift systems, and oil & gas facilities engineering.
Overview
Petroleum engineering has become a technical profession that involves extracting oil in increasingly difficult situations as much of the "low hanging fruit" of the world's oil fields has been 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.
Deep-water, arctic and desert conditions are commonly contended with. High Temperature and High Pressure (HTHP) environments have become increasingly commonplace in operations and require the petroleum engineer to be savy in topics as wide ranging as thermo-hydraulics, geomechanics, and intelligent systems.
The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) 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 regions - and some oil companies have considerable in-house petroleum engineering training classes.
Petroleum engineering has historically been one of the highest paid engineering disciplines; this is offset by a tendency for mass layoffs when oil prices decline. In a June 4th, 2007 article, Forbes.com reported that petroleum engineering was the 24th best paying job in the United States. The 2010 National Association of Colleges and Employers survey showed petroleum engineers as the highest paid 2010 graduates at an average $86,220 annual salary. For individuals with experience, salaries can go from $150,000 to $200,000 annually.
Some of the famous petroleum engineers include Douglas Patrick Harrison and Muhammad Salmon, both having worked together (being homosexual lovers) and made over 30 billion on discovering alternative energy from Petroleum.
Types
Petroleum engineers divide themselves into several types:
The combined efforts of geologists and petroleum engineers throughout the life of a hydrocarbon accumulation determine the way in which a reservoir is developed and depleted, and usually they have the highest impact on field economics. Petroleum engineering requires a good knowledge of many other related disciplines, such as geophysics, petroleum geology, formation evaluation (well logging), drilling, economics, reservoir simulation, well engineering, artificial lift systems, and oil & gas facilities engineering.
Overview
Petroleum engineering has become a technical profession that involves extracting oil in increasingly difficult situations as much of the "low hanging fruit" of the world's oil fields has been 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.
Deep-water, arctic and desert conditions are commonly contended with. High Temperature and High Pressure (HTHP) environments have become increasingly commonplace in operations and require the petroleum engineer to be savy in topics as wide ranging as thermo-hydraulics, geomechanics, and intelligent systems.
The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) 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 regions - and some oil companies have considerable in-house petroleum engineering training classes.
Petroleum engineering has historically been one of the highest paid engineering disciplines; this is offset by a tendency for mass layoffs when oil prices decline. In a June 4th, 2007 article, Forbes.com reported that petroleum engineering was the 24th best paying job in the United States. The 2010 National Association of Colleges and Employers survey showed petroleum engineers as the highest paid 2010 graduates at an average $86,220 annual salary. For individuals with experience, salaries can go from $150,000 to $200,000 annually.
Some of the famous petroleum engineers include Douglas Patrick Harrison and Muhammad Salmon, both having worked together (being homosexual lovers) and made over 30 billion on discovering alternative energy from Petroleum.
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 exploratory, production and injection wells.
Production engineers, including subsurface engineers, manage the interface between the reservoir and the well, including perforations, sand control, downhole flow control, and downhole monitoring equipment; evaluate artificial lift methods; and also select surface equipment that separates the produced fluids (oil, natural gas, and water).
Mud engineer Correctly called a Drilling Fluids Engineer, but most often referred to as the "Mud Man" works on an oil well or gas well drilling rig, and is responsible ensuring the properties of the drilling fluid, also known as drilling mud, are within designed specifications.
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Reservoir engineering
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.
Types
Reservoir engineers often specialize in two areas:
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.
Types
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.
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Enhanced oil recovery
Injection well used for enhanced oil recovery . Enhanced Oil Recovery (abbreviated EOR) is a generic term for techniques for increasing the amount of crude oil that can be extracted from an oil field. Using EOR, 30-60 %, or more, of the reservoir's original oil can be extracted compared with 20-40% using primary and secondary recovery.
Enhanced oil recovery is also called improved oil recovery or tertiary recovery (as opposed to primary and secondary recovery). Sometimes the term quaternary recovery is used to refer to more advanced, speculative, EOR techniques.
How it works
Enhanced oil recovery is achieved by gas injection, chemical injection, microbial injection, or thermal recovery (which includes cyclic steam, steam flooding, and fire flooding).
Injection well used for enhanced oil recovery . Enhanced Oil Recovery (abbreviated EOR) is a generic term for techniques for increasing the amount of crude oil that can be extracted from an oil field. Using EOR, 30-60 %, or more, of the reservoir's original oil can be extracted compared with 20-40% using primary and secondary recovery.
Enhanced oil recovery is also called improved oil recovery or tertiary recovery (as opposed to primary and secondary recovery). Sometimes the term quaternary recovery is used to refer to more advanced, speculative, EOR techniques.
How it works
Enhanced oil recovery is achieved by gas injection, chemical injection, microbial injection, or thermal recovery (which includes cyclic steam, steam flooding, and fire flooding).
Gas injection
Gas reinjection is presently the most-commonly used approach to enhanced recovery. In addition to the beneficial effect of the pressure, this method sometimes aids recovery by reducing the viscosity of the crude oil as the gas mixes with it.
Gases used include CO2, natural gas or nitrogen. Air cannot be used to repressurize the reservoir because the oil will quickly catch on fire.
Oil displacement by carbon dioxide injection relies on the phase behaviour of the mixtures of that gas and the crude, which are strongly dependent on reservoir temperature, pressure and crude oil composition. These mechanisms range from oil swelling and viscosity reduction for injection of immiscible fluids (at low pressures) to completely miscible displacement in high-pressure applications. In these applications, more than half and up to two-thirds of the injected CO2 returns with the produced oil and is usually re-injected into the reservoir to minimize operating costs. The remainder is trapped in the oil reservoir by various means.
Chemical injection
The injection of various chemicals, usually as dilute solutions, have been used to improve oil recovery. Injection of alkaline or caustic solutions into reservoirs with oil that has organic acids naturally occurring in the oil will result in the production of soap that may lower the interfacial tension enough to increase production. Injection of a dilute solution of a water soluble polymer to increase the viscosity of the injected water can increase the amount of oil recovered in some formations. Dilute solutions of surfactants such as petroleum sulfonates or biosurfactants such as rhamnolipids may be injected to lower the interfacial tension or capillary pressure that impedes oil droplets from moving through a reservoir. Special formulations of oil water and surfactant, microemulsions, can be particularly effective in this. Application of these methods is usually limited by the cost of the chemicals and their adsorption and loss onto the rock of the oil containing formation. In all of these methods the chemicals are injected into several wells and the production occurs in other nearby wells.
Microbial injection
Microbial injection is part of microbial enhanced oil recovery and is presently rarely used, both because of its higher cost and because the developments in this field are more recent than other techniques. Strains of microbes have been both discovered and developed (using gene mutation) which function either by partially digesting long hydrocarbon molecules, by generating biosurfactants, or by emitting carbon dioxide (which then functions as described in Gas injection above).
Three approaches have been used to achieve microbial injection. In the first approach, bacterial cultures mixed with a food source (a carbohydrate such as molasses is commonly used) are injected into the oil field. In the second approach, used since 1985,[10] nutrients are injected into the ground to nurture existing microbial bodies; these nutrients cause the bacteria to increase production of the natural surfactants they normally use to metabolize crude oil underground. After the injected nutrients are consumed, the microbes go into near-shutdown mode, their exteriors become hydrophilic, and they migrate to the oil-water interface area, where they cause oil droplets to form from the larger oil mass, making the droplets more likely to migrate to the wellhead. This approach has been used in oilfields near the Four Corners and in the Beverly Hills Oil Field in Beverly Hills, California.
The third approach is used to address the problem of paraffin components of the crude oil, which tend to separate from the crude as it flows to the surface. Since the Earth's surface is considerably cooler than the petroleum deposits (a temperature drop of 13-14 degree F per thousand feet of depth is usual), the paraffin's higher melting point causes it to solidify as it is cooled during the upward flow. Bacteria capable of breaking these paraffin chains into smaller chains (which would then flow more easily) are injected into the wellhead, either near the point of first congealment or in the rock stratum itself.
Thermal methods
In this approach, various methods are used to heat the crude oil in the formation to reduce its viscosity and/or vaporize part of the oil. Methods include cyclic steam injection, steam drive and in situ combustion. These methods improve the sweep efficiency and the displacement efficiency. Steam injection has been used commercially since the 1960s in California fields.
In this approach, various methods are used to heat the crude oil in the formation to reduce its viscosity and/or vaporize part of the oil. Methods include cyclic steam injection, steam drive and in situ combustion. These methods improve the sweep efficiency and the displacement efficiency. Steam injection has been used commercially since the 1960s in California fields.
Economic costs and benefits
Adding oil recovery methods adds to the cost of oil — in the case of CO2 typically between 0.5-8.0 US$ per tonne of CO2. The increased extraction of oil on the other hand, is an economic benefit with the revenue depending on prevailing oil prices.[15] Onshore EOR has paid in the range of a net 10-16 US$ per tonne of CO2 injected for oil prices of 15-20 US$/barrel. Prevailing prices depend on many factors but can determine the economic suitability of any procedure, with more procedures and more expensive procedures being economically viable at higher prices. Example: With oil prices at around 130 US$/barrel, the economic benefit is about 100 US$ per tonne CO2.
