As the Industry Has Changed, So Has Petroleum Engineering Education

Abstract

Petroleum industry technologies have advanced significantly since the birth of SPE 50 years ago. The industry today is drilling wells 6 or 7 miles long, and nearly as deep. Offshore, operators are "routinely" drilling and completing wells in 7,000 to 10,000 ft of water, using state-of-the-art drillships that were not available to the industry just a few years ago. Robust electronics measure downhole temperature, pressure, and other parameters as wells become "smarter" than ever before. The industry is learning to mine data and, even better, learning how to use the data better to construct optimally performing wells. And although the basic structure of the courses offered for bachelor and master's degrees in petroleum engineering has not changed dramatically during the past 50 years, curricula have kept pace with the evolving technology and the changes in the profession. In addition, students are expected to learn much of the new technology post-graduate on the job or in specialized short courses offered by the industry rather than just by a textbook course at the university level. Several universities now offer distance-education programs, providing engineers already working in the field a means to continue their educations toward a master's degree, and engineers also can take several courses Lee toward a PhD degree in a distance-education program. Many changes have occurred in the teaching of petroleum engineering over the decades. "One thing that was essential 50 years ago for most petroleum engineering and, arguably, most other engineering curricula, is that they were more concerned with technology and nuts and bolts," said W. John Lee, who has been a petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M University for 30 years and holds the L.F. Peterson Endowed Chair at the school. "Today, they are much more concerned with the fundamentals and the applications of what I would call engineering science to solve engineering problems." For example, Lee said, most engineers 50 years ago took such courses as surveying, machine shop, and welding, "hands-on courses that all engineers took. Today, that is all gone. Engineers now concentrate on just the fundamental math and science." Part of the reason is the computer technology available that, of course, was not available or widely used decades ago. However, Lee emphasized that the move toward the sort of curriculum concentrating on math and science fundamentals began before computers took over. "Now there is a need to develop and use mathematical models for everything," he said. "To understand the mathematical models you have to understand the basic physics and, in turn, have some understanding of the math that is involved in solving the equations of the physics models. That was beyond our capability for the most part 50 years ago. We could not begin to think about solving some of the problems. The arithmetic was just too horrendous, so we used very simple assumptions and approximations."