Petroleum engineering - Essay Example

Petroleum Engineering is a field of engineering which deals with the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gases. The petroleum engineer’s job begins after a geologist’s exploration of the site, and then the petroleum engineer aims to extract the liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons from the earth’s porous rocks under high pressure. Petroleum engineer should also have a good grip on various other subjects in order to achieve the complete command on the issues such as drilling, geophysics, petroleum geology, well logging, economics of petroleum, reservoir engineering, computer simulations etc (ELC, 2014).

Petroleum engineering field was first introduced in 1914 by the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) and in 1915 the first degree in Petroleum Engineering was awarded by the University of Pittsburgh. Ever since this discipline has evolved and has helped in exploring Petroleum, and with the help of ever growing technologies involved in this field, this subject has literally changed the face of the earth and economics. (Honeycutt, 2013) Petroleum Engineering is used to explore and produce hydrocarbons.

They are usually buried deep underground, or under deep sea, in arctic regions, and even in deserts. A petroleum engineer along with geophysicists is responsible for the exploration, development and depletion of a hydrocarbon reservoir. Petroleum engineering can be sub classified in to petro physical engineering, drilling engineering, reservoir engineering and production engineering. All these areas of specialization have a unique role in the field of petroleum engineering. Drilling engineering is the first step in oil and gas extraction, a drilling engineer is responsible for digging out the subsurface to surface in an optimized fashion.

This field deals with the study of the earth to be drilled, the stresses