Petroleum Engineering: An Emerging Discipline for the 21st Century

Abstract

ABSTRACT Petroleum engineering as a discipline has historically been intimately allied with a single industry. As such, the discipline is often viewed as being more of a technical specialty than as a fundamental discipline in the same sense as chemical, civil, electrical, or mechanical engineering. However, there are distinctive factors that make petroleum engineering fundamentally different from other engineering disciplines, much in the same way that mechanical engineering is different from chemical engineering. These differences make petroleum engineers best qualified to deal with the general class of engineering problems involving fluid movement within the earth, even in such non-energy related areas as hydrology and underground waste disposal. In addition to the need for petroleum engineers for hydrocarbon extraction, it is likely that as we move into the next century, many natural resource problems will require increasing reliance on technical expertise that can and should be supplied by what are currently called petroleum engineers. Nomenclature has forced petroleum engineering into being a narrowly-perceived discipline, when in reality it possesses as much or more breadth as any other engineering discipline. The time is at hand for the discipline of petroleum engineering to stake out a claim to address all engineering problems involving fluid transport in the earth. No other engineering discipline provides a more appropriate base of knowledge and methodology. An example undergraduate curriculum is proposed for the education of petroleum engineers for the 21 st century. It is further proposed that the term "petroleum engineering" may not be entirely appropriate to fully describe this more fundamental emerging discipline.