Branches of petroleum engineering

During the evolution of petroleum engineering, a number of areas of specialization developed: drilling engineering, production engineering and surface facilities engineering, reservoir engineering, and petrophysical engineering. Within these four areas are subsets of specialization engineers, including some from other disciplines—such as mechanical, civil, electrical, geological, geophysical, and chemical engineering. The unique role of the petroleum engineer is to integrate all the specializations into an efficient system of oil and gas drilling, production, and processing.

Drilling engineering was among the first applications of technology to oil field practices. The drilling engineer is responsible for the design of the earth-penetration techniques, the selection of casing and safety equipment, and, often, the direction of the operations. These functions involve understanding the nature of the rocks to be penetrated, the stresses in these rocks, and the techniques available to drill into and control the underground reservoirs. Because drilling involves organizing a vast array of service companies, machinery, and materials, investing huge funds, working with local governments and communities, and acknowledging the safety and welfare of the general public, the engineer must develop the skills of supervision, management, and negotiation.

The work of production engineers and surface facilities engineers begins upon completion of the well—directing the selection of producing intervals and making arrangements for various accessories, controls, and equipment. Later the work of these engineers involves controlling and measuring the produced fluids (oil, gas, and water), designing and installing gathering and storage systems, and delivering the raw products (gas and oil) to pipeline companies and other transportation agents. These engineers are also involved in such matters as corrosion prevention, well performance, and formation treatments to stimulate production. As in all branches of petroleum engineering, production engineers and surface facilities engineers cannot view the in-hole or surface processing problems in isolation but must fit solutions into the complete reservoir, well, and surface system, and thus they must collaborate with both the drilling and reservoir engineers.

Reservoir engineers are concerned with the physics of oil and gas distribution and their flow through porous rocks—the various hydrodynamic, thermodynamic, gravitational, and other forces involved in the rock-fluid system. They are responsible for analyzing the rock-fluid system, establishing efficient well-drainage patterns, forecasting the performance of the oil or gas reservoir, and introducing methods for maximum efficient production.

To understand the reservoir rock-fluid system, the drilling, production, and reservoir engineers are helped by the petrophysical, or formation-evaluation, engineer, who provides tools and analytical techniques for determining rock and fluid characteristics. The petrophysical engineer measures the acoustic, radioactive, and electrical properties of the rock-fluid system and takes samples of the rocks and well fluids to determine porosity, permeability, and fluid content in the reservoir.

While each of these four specialty areas have individual engineering responsibilities, it is only through an integrated geoscience and petroleum engineering effort that complex reservoirs are now being developed. For example, the process of reservoir characterization, otherwise known as developing a static model of the reservoir, is a collaboration between geophysicists, statisticians, petrophysicists, geologists, and reservoir engineers to map the reservoir and establish its geological structure, stratigraphy, and deposition. The use of statistics helps turn the static model into a dynamic model by smoothing the trends and uncertainties that appear in the gaps in the static model. The dynamic model is used by the reservoir engineer and reservoir simulation engineer with support from geoscientists to establish the volume of the reservoir based on its fluid properties, reservoir pressures and temperatures, and any existing well data. The output of the dynamic model is typically a production forecast of oil, water, and gas with a breakdown of the associated development and operations costs that occur during the life of the project. Various production scenarios are constructed with the dynamic model to ensure that all possible outcomes—including enhanced recovery, subsurface stimulation, product price changes, infrastructure changes, and the site’s ultimate abandonment—are considered. Iterative inputs from the various engineering and geoscience team members from initial geology assessments to final reservoir forecasts of reserves being produced from the simulator help minimize uncertainties and risks in developing oil and gas.