Teaching

This 1-credit hour course is taught in the summer after the completion of the sophomore year and is designed to introduce the students to oil and gas field facilities and other engineering operations. On-site visits to various oil field operations in the past included the Rocky Mountain region, the U.S. Gulf Coast, California, Alaska, Canada and Europe. Topics covered include drilling, completions, stimulations, surface facilities, production, artificial lift, reservoir, geology and geophysics. Also included are environmental, safety and social responsibility issues as related to the petroleum industry.

This two-week course is taken after the completion of the junior year. Emphasis is placed on the multidisciplinary nature of reservoir management. Field trips in the area provide the opportunity to study eolian, fluvial, lacustrine, near shore, and marine depositional systems. These field trips provide the setting for understanding the complexity of each system in the context of reservoir development and management. Petroleum systems including the source, maturity, and trapping of hydrocarbons are studied in the context of petroleum exploration and development. Geologic methods incorporating both surface and subsurface data are used extensively

PEGN 423 is an undergraduate course offered in the Fall semester of the senior year. The course focuses on the data requirements for reservoir engineering studies and the classical methods for estimation of reserves of petroleum reservoirs (e.g., volumetrics, material balance, decline curve analysis). Additionally, this course provides an introduction to unconventional reservoirs, and the application of engineering methods to the estimation of reserves of unconventional petroleum reservoirs.

PEGN 424 is offered in the Spring semester of the senior year. This course presents reservoir engineering aspects of supplemental recovery processes, including liquid-liquid and gas-liquid displacement processes, and enhanced oil recovery processes. Also included in this course is the introduction to numerical reservoir simulation, history matching and forecasting. Applications of numerical reservoir simulation to unconventional reservoirs are briefly introduced at the end of the course.

This is a multidisciplinary design course that integrates fundamental and design concepts in geology, geophysics, and petroleum engineering. Students work in teams consisting of five students. Multiple open-ended design problems in oil and gas exploration and field development, including the development of a prospect in an exploration play and a detailed engineering field study are assigned. Several detailed written and oral presentations are made throughout the semester. Project economics including risk analysis are an integral part of the course.

This graduate course presents fundamental concepts of numerical methods and the implementation of this methods using MATLAB as programming language. Students solve problems of interest in Petroleum Engineering through the use of numerical methods. Numerical techniques studied in this course include methods for root finding, linear algebraic equations, curve fitting, numerical differentiation and integration, optimization, solution of linear and nonlinear ordinary differential equations, and partial differential equations.