Petroleum Engineering

8 Key excerpts on "Petroleum Engineering"

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  eBook - ePub

  Petroleum Engineering: Principles, Calculations, and Workflows

  • Moshood Sanni(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • American Geophysical Union

    (Publisher)

  1 Petroleum System and Petroleum Engineering

  Petroleum can be used to describe naturally occurring semisolid, liquid, and gas composed of organic compounds. Petroleum types include bitumen, crude oil, and natural gas. The term petroleum can also be used to describe naturally occurring crude oil and its derivatives. In this book, petroleum will mean bitumen, oil, and gas, while derivatives of petroleum will be referred to as petroleum products. The properties of petroleum reservoir fluids are discussed in Chapter 3 .

  The primary function of a petroleum engineer is to find economical and environmentally acceptable ways of producing petroleum fluids. In order for a petroleum engineer to achieve this objective, the factors affecting the ability of a reservoir to hold fluids, the flow of single and multiphase fluid through the reservoir, the production system at low and high pressure, the reservoir rock and fluid interaction must be well understood. In recent times, environmental considerations have played a crucial role in petroleum exploration and production activities. As such, petroleum engineers are expected to seek technology with minimum environmental damage. Operational activities in the petroleum industry at exploration and production activities are expected to conform to stringent environmental regulations in most parts of the world.

  1.1. THE PETROLEUM ENGINEER

  Petroleum engineers, based on roles and responsibilities, can generally be classified as either reservoir engineers or production engineers.

  Reservoir engineers have the primary function of optimizing petroleum/hydrocarbon recovery from subsurface reservoirs. The roles of a reservoir engineer vary depending on the life of a reservoir/field, company, division/department within the company, and size of company. Some of the primary functions of a reservoir engineer include, but are not limited to: estimation of hydrocarbons in place; estimating recoverable hydrocarbon; creating hydrocarbon recovery profiles with time; optimization of hydrocarbon recovery; working in a multidisciplinary team to build reservoir models.

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  Information Sources in Engineering

  • Roderick A. Macleod, Jim Corlett, Roderick A. Macleod, Jim Corlett(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Saur

    (Publisher)

  Offshore Engineering as a concept has arisen from the challenge of exploiting hydrocarbon resources under the seabed: in its advanced forms a response to the economic and political situation in the 1960s and 1970s, and most notably exemplified by the development of North Sea oil and gas. Offshore Engineering is a 'bolt-on' to Petroleum Engineering. The concerns •^652 PETROLEUM AND OFFSHORE ENGINEERING of Petroleum Engineering (such as seismic surveying, drilling, reservoir engineering) are present equally on land and offshore, but the engineering required to provide (literally and metaphorically) a platform for this in the marine environment is an expensive extra with its own information sources. The main areas of research in Petroleum Engineering are related to explo-ration techniques, drilling further (both vertically downwards and horizontally), and methods of extracting a higher proportion of the oil from the rock (reservoir and production engineering). The oil industry is truly international, though in many aspects domi-nated by the United States of America. It meets a large and continuous demand for energy in the form of fuel, yet it is prone to boom and bust cycles (which can be monitored by plotting the price of oil). It has the wealth and drive to innovate on a grand scale, but it is in many ways conser-vative with an often old-fashioned outlook. This is reflected in its information generation and transmission. Information flow The petroleum industry handles the publication of information in ways which probably differ from other subject areas in this book. The propor-tion of industry-originated to university-originated publication in the petroleum industry is very much weighted to material coming from industry practitioners. Much of this could be characterised as industry experience rather than academic research.

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  Engineering Technology and Industrial Chemistry with Applications

  • Reza K. Haghi, Francisco Torrens, Reza K. Haghi, Francisco Torrens(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Apple Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Ray Chaudhuri 1 deeply comprehended on the success and scientific potential of petrochemicals and Petroleum Engineering today. The author widely researched on the field of petrochemicals with the sole objective of furtherance of science and engineering. The author started with deep scientific vision on the various components of crude oil, petroleum products, and test methods and finally processing operations in a petroleum refinery. Petrochemicals stand as a major component and toward the scientific success of Petroleum Engineering science and petroleum refining as a whole. Mankind today stands in the midst of a difficult and ever-growing crisis of depletion of fossil fuel resources. Thus, comes the utmost need of energy sustainability. Energy, food, and water are the important components in a nation’s economic growth today. Technological vision, the intricacies of petroleum technology, and future challenges of science will all lead a long and visionary way in the true emancipation of petrochemical technology today. Energy sustainability and petroleum refining/petroleum technology are the two opposite sides of the visionary coin. Progress of human civilization depends on the scientific success and scientific profundity of human research pursuit. Innovations in petroleum refining and petrochemicals, and the deep scientific vision behind it are the hallmarks of human scientific endeavor today. Petroleum is a fossilized mass that is accumulated below the earth’s surface from time immemorial. Raw petroleum is known as crude (petroleum) oil or mineral oil. It is a mixture of various organic substances and is the source of hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane and various other paraffinic, napthenic, and aromatic hydrocarbons, the building blocks of today’s organic industry. Various petroleum products, such as gaseous and liquid fuels, lubricating oil, solvents, asphalts, waxes, and coke are derived from refining crude oil

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  Gas Engineering

  Vol. 1: Origin and Reservoir Engineering

  • James G. Speight(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Production engineering 4.1 Introduction Natural gas production engineering is a sub-division of crude oil production engi-neering which involves the design and use of subsurface equipment to produce the gas (and in some cases the associated crude oil). More specifically, natural gas pro-duction includes the following steps (i) evaluating inflow and outflow performance between the reservoir and the well bore, (ii) designing completion systems includ-ing tubing selection, sand control, and, in the case of tight formation, hydraulic fracturing, selecting artificial lift equipment, including sucker-rod lift gas lift, elec-trical submersible pumps, subsurface hydraulic pumps, progressing-cavity pumps, and plunger lift, which involves outflow that is defined as the flow of the gas from the casing perforations to the surface facilities, and (iii) selecting equipment for sur-face facilities that separate and measure the produced fluids (oil, natural gas, water, and impurities), prepare the oil and gas for transportation to market, and handle dis-posal of any water and impurities. Thus, the production engineer is responsible for monitoring the production op-erations, ensuring adherence to safety protocols, and strategizing on maximizing productivity to deliver efficient results that would drive revenues and increase prof-itability. In fact, the choice of a production engineering teams involves engineers from other technical disciplines such as chemical engineering, mechanical engi-neering, mechanical engineering, geologists, and chemists. In short, few problems are solved by a single discipline and no one discipline can satisfy the needs of the production of the gas which not only the engineering aspects of gas production but also a thorough knowledge of the underground formation and the properties of the gas to ensure maximum efficiency of the production process.

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  Environmental Analysis and Technology for the Refining Industry

  • James G. Speight(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Interscience

    (Publisher)

  As an histor- ical aside, environmental engineering (formerly known as sanitary engineering) originally developed as a subdiscipline of civil engineering. Despite numerous safety protocols that are in place and the care taken to avoid environmental incidents (EPA, 2004), virtually every industry suffers accidents that lead to environmental problems, complexities, and chemical contamination. The petroleum industry is no exception to such accidents. It is therefore helpful to be aware of the nature of the raw material and the products arising therefrom, in order to understand the nature of any contamination and thus the best cleanup methods to choose. Frequently, the existence and source of such information is unknown thus the data are not examined. Even when the existence and sources of information are known, decisions must be made in order to make an informed, and often quick decision on the next steps, even if later, one decides not to use it for a particular application. Knowing about the relevant data gives investigators and analysts the ability to assess the data based on quality assurance criteria. This is especially true for users near the end of long decision processes, such as site cleanup, ecological risk assessments, and natural resource damage assessments. Environmental Analysis and Technology for the Refining Industry, by James G. Speight Copyright  2005 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 3 4 DEFINITIONS AND TERMINOLOGY Considering the composition of petroleum and petroleum products (Speight, 1994, 1999), it is not surprising that petroleum and petroleum-derived chemicals are environmental pollutants (Loeher, 1992; Olschewsky and Megna, 1992). The world’s economy is highly dependent on petroleum for energy production, and widespread use has led to enormous releases to the environment of petroleum, petroleum products, exhaust from internal combustion engines, emissions from oil-fired power plants, and industrial emissions where fuel oil is employed.

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  New Technologies in the Oil and Gas Industry

  • Jorge Salgado Gomes(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • IntechOpen

    (Publisher)

  Integration challenge. It is often quoted that the use of the word “Integration” in SPE paper titles has followed a ‘hockey stick’ rise in recent years. Books have been written on the subject of integration and in the forward to one such study – Luca Cosentino[4] pointed out that studies were merely becoming less disintegrated as the industry evolved. The industry has developed ever more powerful, cross-disciplinary software platforms and workflows to help integration. In parallel is the need for professionals to stay abreast of the key work processes in each discipline and this chapter helps illustrate one such integrated approach from a scientific/technological approach rather than embedded in or wedded to particular software. Geoengineering concept. This concept was introduced [1] into petroleum industry to capture the spirit of the workflow being a seamless progression from geological conceptual © 2012 Corbett, licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. New Technologies in the Oil and Gas Industry 182 understanding, through petrophysical description to a numerical model and prediction of a dynamic response. The Petroleum Geoengineering approach outlined here is a small component of an all encompassing “Intentional manipulation of the subsurface environment as practiced by the petroleum industry with global impact”. The recovery of oil and gas and the management of CO2 being the ultimate outcome and target of this approach. Static and dynamic reservoir characterisation . Reservoir Characterisation is defined as the numerical quantification of reservoirs for numerical simulation. The petroleum industry often refers to static and dynamic characterisation of the subsurface and many workers will have their own interpretation of the terms.

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  Productivity in Natural Resource Industries

  Improvement through Innovation

  • R. David Simpson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Technological Improvement in Petroleum Exploration and Development Douglas R. Bohi

  DOUGLAS R. BOHI is vice president at Charles River Associates, Washington, D.C.

  E xploration for oil and natural gas has changed a great deal since the days when prospects were identified on the basis of surface oil seeps or topographical formations and when drilling was characterized by a group of roughnecks operating a rotary drilling rig and waiting for a gusher to erupt. Over the past two decades, geologists and geophysicists have developed sophisticated seismic techniques to generate mountains of data that are fed into supercomputers via satellites and used to build complex three-dimensional structural models of the earth. Similarly, drillers now use steerable downhole motors to create wellbores that bend and turn at all angles, as well as sensory systems next to the drill bit to determine its location and angle and the composition of the rock layers as they are encountered. And, where not long ago the search for hydrocarbons was restricted to land areas or shallow water, the technology has been developed to explore in water too deep to use fixed-leg platforms. In this environment, remote drilling systems must be used, production platforms must float, and pressures and temperatures are such that oil and gas flowing through subsea pipelines can turn into paraffin and crystals.

  Some of the changes in the technology of petroleum exploration and development rival in imagination and expense those involved in exploring outer space. They are a central part of a dramatic story of productivity change that has occurred in the industry in only ten years. This chapter describes the changes in technology and their contribution to lowering costs and boosting productivity in petroleum exploration and development.

  The term productivity is used in the conventional way to mean the amount of output that can be produced with a given amount of inputs. However, the measures of outputs and inputs used in the context of petroleum exploration and development are not conventional. For example, for the measure of output it is more meaningful to refer to the level of success in finding new discoveries rather than the amount of oil and gas produced. Similarly, the measure of inputs refers to the number of wells drilled or seismic crews at work rather than the more conventional number of labor hours or amount of capital investment. More will be said about the measures of productivity below.

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  Petrochemistry

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Library Press

    (Publisher)

  WT ____________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ____________________ Chapter- 15 Petroleum Pumpjack pumping an oil well near Lubbock, Texas Petroleum (L. petroleum , from Greek: petra (rock) + Latin: oleum (oil)) or crude oil is a naturally occurring, flammable liquid consisting of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons of various molecular weights and other liquid organic compounds, that are found in geologic formations beneath the Earth's surface. Petroleum is recovered mostly through oil drilling. It is refined and separated, most easily by boiling point, into a large number of consumer products, from gasoline and kerosene to asphalt and chemical reagents used to make plastics and pharmaceuticals. WT ____________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ____________________ The term petroleum is found (in the spelling petraoleum) in tenth-century Old English sources. It was used in the treatise De Natura Fossilium , published in 1546 by the German mineralogist Georg Bauer, also known as Georgius Agricola. In the 19th Century, the term petroleum was frequently used to refer to mineral oils produced by distillation from mined organic solids such as cannel coal (and later oil shale), and refined oils produced from them; in the United Kingdom storage (and later transport) of these oils were regulated by a series of Petroleum Acts, from the Petroleum Act 1862 c. 66 onward. Composition In its strictest sense, petroleum includes only crude oil, but in common usage it includes all liquid, gaseous, and solid (e.g., paraffin) hydrocarbons. Under surface pressure and temperature conditions, lighter hydrocarbons methane, ethane, propane and butane occur as gases, while pentane and heavier ones are in the form of liquids or solids. However, in an underground oil reservoir the proportions of gas, liquid, and solid depend on subsurface conditions and on the phase diagram of the petroleum mixture. An oil well produces predominantly crude oil, with some natural gas dissolved in it.

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