On Job Training (OJT) Accelerated Learning of Reservoir Management Engineers
Authors: AL Muraikhi Ahmed , Wang Yanhui A. , Elhayek Soha , Shenawi Shamsuddin , Alqahtani Abdulwahab S. , Alnahdi Afnan M. 
Published: September 2016

Petroleum Engineering in Saudi Aramco has implemented a new training workshop, called On Job Training (OJT) for young engineers working in geosciences, following completion of the onboarding program offered by Saudi Aramco Upstream Professional Development Center (UPDC). The objective of this new training strategy is to accelerate the transformation of oil & gas engineering knowledge and experience to young engineers who are from a variety of universities around the world, to reduce their professional gaps existing in industry. This enhancing professional competency program is being achieved by conducting integrated detail reviewing of the matured reservoirs selected, with representative reservoir and development characters, including long production history and detailed data. This training provided a solid foundation for the participants through dealing with real-life examples and help them to sharpen their analyzing and thinking abilities for a new reservoir engineering era. The young engineers are chartered with the main objectives of reservoir engineers, which is hydrocarbon fluid reservoir sweeping efficiency. After developing a fundamental understanding of geological settings and characterizations, the engineers are trained to conduct detailed analyses of wells and reservoir production/injection performance, with a focus on determining the current recovery behavior. Participants are tasked to develop solutions derived from their identified challenges to improve the areal/vertical sweeping efficiency, to secure the maximal recovery of reserves.

The participants in each workshop are assigned to small groups from different disciplines and experience levels for maximal exposure of the reservoir challenge to each participant. The young engineers come from different Upstream disciplines: Geology and Geophysics, Reservoir Description and Well Testing, Reservoir Simulation and Reservoir Management, Facilities and Computer Engineering.

The workshop starts with reservoir management codes and roles while securing the reservoir healthy in development. It divides the whole process into three main staged phases. The first is to understand the static nature of the reservoir mainly the matrix information such as geology, rock and fluid-in-place. The second is the dynamic character which is the fluid movements and the changes of physical properties. And the third part is the reversion interpretation of historical performance, by integrating both natures, static and dynamic, to further understand the complexity of the reservoir and the interior correlations of reservoir continuity such as reservoir connections among wells.

The participants practice the ability of extracting the data related to the field and analyzing the data thoroughly. Then the data is put together and integrated to explain the fluid dynamic movements. The trainees also develop their reservoir thinking skills by identifying the challenges, and formulating future action plans, to improve the sweep and maximize the oil recovery.