Petroleum Engineering

Course Overview

While the program encourages students with an undergraduate degree in petroleum engineering to pursue graduate study, many graduate students are accepted with backgrounds in other areas of engineering, such as chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, or geological engineering. The program accepts such students with the expectation that any remedial petroleum engineering coursework will be met by the student while in residence for the master's degree. Students with backgrounds in geology or geophysics will also need to complete all fundamental engineering courses required for a degree in engineering. Graduate students studying for a masters degree with a thesis option typically find support for their study depending on current research projects and the availability of funding. Students preferring the non-thesis option are typically self-funding for their masters degree. Each student's graduate degree program is designed around a set of core petroleum engineering courses and other courses selected to support the thesis topic of interest. Students identify their thesis topic by the end of their first semester. Research specialties of the petroleum engineering program include reservoir enhancement, hydraulic fracturing, CO2 sequestration, gel treatments, drilling, well completion performance studies, and geomechanics of petroleum recovery. The program emphasizes mechanical earth modeling (MEM) as a specialty. The MEM group owns part of the university numerical intensive computing cluster. Students with a strong background in geological engineering and geomechanics will likely find excellent opportunities for advanced studies. The petroleum engineering laboratories contain modern equipment designed to study the many problems encountered in oil and gas production, as well as support research. The department laboratories include gas porosimeter and permeameter, liquid permeameter, viscometers, tensiometers, and a HPTP core flooding cell. The program also utilizes departmental facilities that include core cutting and preparation, laser ablation, XRD, SEM, and a triaxial and fracture cell and a direct shear apparatus for determining rock and fracture properties.