Integrated Petroleum Engineering Simulation and Decision Making Teaching Program
Authors: Cooper George A. , Mota Jose F. , Cooper Alexander G. 
Published: December 2007

A course of exercises has been developed that trains the student in the different steps involved in discovering and evaluating the economic worth of an oil field. The objective is for the course to act as a link for several different aspects of petroleum engineering - seismic analysis, drilling and completion, logging, well testing, reservoir evaluation and economic analysis - that the student has been taught in detail in the specialist courses that he/she has attended during the course of his/her petroleum engineering education.

To do this, a fictitious oil field has been invented, and its details incorporated into a simulator that allows drilling, logging and other operations to be carried out so that the student gradually learns about the properties of the field during the course of a series of "hands on" exercises. Once the investigation is complete, the student has enough information to make an economic evaluation of the field, and is in a position to determine the necessary economic criteria - investment required, net present value, return on investment etc. - that will allow the "company" owning the lease to decide whether to go ahead with developing the field.

Introduction

Petroleum Industry Technical Managers have often expressed the view that although new engineering graduates entering the industry from a university have extensive technical knowledge, it tends to be held in isolated blocks that reflect the disciplines in which it was taught, rather than being available as a means for solving problems that require the combination of information from several different sources. For example, although the graduate may have an extensive knowledge of fluid mechanics, electrical engineering and materials science, he/she has never been exposed to the process whereby elements from each of these disciplines are brought together to make an efficient and effective design for an electric pump.

With this in mind, we have developed a course for petroleum engineering students that guides the student through various steps that are involved in discovering and evaluating a petroleum reservoir. The course consists of a series of eleven exercises, each of which deals with a different engineering topic, and which together lead from the early discovery of the field through to the decision to develop it or not. The exercises make extensive use of a computer-based drilling simulator that allows a "hands on" feel so that, for example, the costs of drilling a well are partially determined by the skill of the student in controlling the drilling process. The simulator also allows wells to be logged so as to get information on the extent and type of hydrocarbons in the well, and the porosity and water saturation of the surrounding formations.

Since each exercise deals with a separate area of knowledge, but only comprises less than ten percent of the course, it is not possible to treat each area with the degree of detail that it might need for the student to understand it fully. Instead, only the material necessary to solve the immediate problem is presented, and it is left to the student to research the necessary background. Indeed, it is hoped that by the time the student is taught this course, he/she will already have taken a range of specialty courses in drilling, logging, reservoir engineering and so on, and the background material should already be entirely familiar. In this way, the course will fulfill its intended function, to act as a "capstone" experience, where knowledge from all the separate specialty courses is brought together in a logical whole.

In order to make the material transportable between different instructors, it has been assembled in the form of an instruction manual with printed versions of the exercises and their solutions, together with the necessary software.

P. 765