Producing oil and gas and other resources from the earth is the primary challenge of the petroleum engineer. In a sense, no other branch of engineering is more concerned with our everyday lives. The petroleum engineer evaluates potential oil and gas reservoirs, oversees drilling activities, selects and implements recovery schemes, and designs surface collection and treatment facilities. The petroleum engineer increasingly uses advanced computers in this work, not only in analysis of exploration data and simulation of reservoir behavior, but also in automation of oilfield production and drilling operations. Many of the world's supercomputers are owned by petroleum companies.
Petroleum engineers have a future full of challenges and opportunities.
They must develop and apply new technology to recover hydrocarbons from oil shale, tar sands, and offshore oil and gas fields. They must also devise new techniques to recover oil left in the ground after application of conventional producing techniques. Techniques developed for the recovery of petroleum will increasingly be applied to the extraction of other important minerals such as in-situ uranium leaching, geothermal energy production, and coal gasification. Petroleum engineers are also able to contribute to such non-energy activities as pollutant remediation, underground waste disposal and hydrology. Since many petroleum companies conduct worldwide operations, the petroleum engineer may have the opportunity for assignments all over the world.