Oils well..

At 7 am every day, a helicopter transports Rahul Gupta, an assistant executive engineer with the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC), from the manned platform where he stays to an unmanned rig for oil exploration. Once there, Gupta feels like a soldier in the frontier. There’s water all around and he has to take every step with caution. “There is so much grease and oil around you that one misstep will send you sprawling,” he says. Gupta’s work there includes data collection — he has to download the information from the electronic gadgets linked to the oil reservoir or well to his computer — and send it to his base office in Mumbai for analysis of pressure in the well and other factors. This will help experts gauge how productive the reservoir is.

Gupta says he took up petroleum engineering because he loves the physical as well as the technical challenges of his job. “ No other industry fulfils this criteria and I didn’t want to become a couch potato, sitting in front of a computer in some office, the whole day,” he adds.

“Petroleum engineering is about looking at the entire hydrocarbon (which can be either crude oil or natural gas) value chain. It, however, focuses more on upstream operations of the oil and gas industry, i.e. drilling, production, transportation and reservoir engineering,” says Anita Yadav, superintending engineer, production, ONGC. Simply put, petroleum engineers search the world for reservoirs containing oil and natural gas. On discovery of these resources they work with geologists and other specialists to understand the geologic formation and properties of the rock containing the reservoir, determine the drilling methods to be used, and monitor drilling and production operations. They design equipment and processes to achieve maximum and profitable recovery of oil and gas. They rely heavily on computer models to simulate reservoir performance using different recovery techniques.

Petroleum engineering “broadly consists of different areas called drilling, reservoir and production stream,” says Yadav. Drilling deals with “placing a well to tap the pay zone, and depending on its purpose, it may be used for analysing the hydrocarbon pool, its development — i.e. for producing oil/gas,” Yadav points out. Reservoir engineering deals with study of the pool (containing oil/hydrocarbon) and work out ways to exploit it. Production engineering comes into play after the reservoir has been understood and wells have been drilled and the hydrocarbon begins to flow. “It deals with the study of optimising well performance through a suitable completion and production strategy. Production engineers are responsible for flow of well fluid through surface facilities (like pipelines), its subsequent separation into phases like oil, gas and water and bringing it to a quality acceptable by the refineries,” Yadav elaborates.

Given the importance of petroleum in our day-to-day life and the increasing demand-supply gap in the energy sector it can be said that there is a big demand of petroleum engineers, which is likely to grow. “The scope for petroleum engineers is very expansive. There is a constant challenge to bring up the recovery factor from the producing fields and even more pressure on discovering new reserves. All this is translating into a high demand for professionals in the sector,” says Yadav.

And who would be employing these professionals? “They are recruited mainly by national and multinational oil companies, oil engineering companies, service companies and also the energy sector,” says T K Sengupta, general manager, production, ONGC.

Author: HT Horizons

Date: 14th April, 2010

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