Future Need of Petroleum Engineering
Authors: Kamal Medhat M. 
Published: November 2020

The need for petroleum engineers to provide energy for the world population in the upcoming decades and the role of SPE in this regard are discussed in this paper. There have been recent papers suggesting that there is a diminished or no need for petroleum engineering (e.g., SPE 194764, The End of Petroleum Engineering as We Know It; SPE 195908, Petroleum Engineering Enrollment: Past, Present and Future). This is simply inaccurate and the proliferation of their message is alarming in that it may deprive the industry from having the required talent to produce the energy the world needs from natural gas and oil for decades to come.

Engineering disciplines, including petroleum, have been transforming all the time. The practices we use today have little resemblance to what we did 20 years ago. They will continue to evolve, not stop, due to three major points:

Although the percentage of the energy from oil and natural gas the world needs is expected to decline from about 53% to about 48% over the next 30 years, the amount of production is actually expected to increase by 20% for oil and 50% for natural gas. This is due mainly to expected increase in world population (from 7.5 to 9 billion) and improvements in the economic conditions of developing countries. Considerable advances and efforts in all aspects of petroleum engineering (from drilling under more challenging conditions to completion and production from deeper wells to increasing recovery from heavy oil and through EOR) are required to meet those higher production levels. We know that even maintaining production at the current level is a challenge. Climate change is real. As engineers we do not debate the science, and we should transform our industry in every possible way to minimize any adverse effects of our work on the environment and to comply with state regulations. One manifestation of this has been the measured increase in historical natural gas production and simultaneous decrease in CO2 emissions. The information and manuscript of this paper were developed before the pandemic of COVID-19 affected most of the world. This is why the effects of this pandemic are not discussed. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable assumption that the pandemic will not affect the long range for energy from oil and natural gas which is the subject of this paper. Another example as one of the major factors in reducing Green House Gases is to inject and store CO2 in underground formations. Petroleum engineers will be the ones tasked with finding answers to the challenge of injecting in already fluid-saturated formations. With the recent developments in Data Science and Engineering Analytics, there is a greater need for petroleum engineers with an understanding of physics to take advantage of these improvements and optimize the processes we use (Anadarko's SPE 187222 Creating Value by Implementing an Integrated Production Surveillance and Optimization System – An Operator's Perspective and Chevron's SPE 181437 Application of Machine Learning in Transient Surveillance in a Deep-Water Oil Field, are good examples).

Required and expected efforts by various stake holders of SPE; educational institutions; national and international operators, service companies, and regulatory bodies to provide needed petroleum engineers are discussed.