Course content

The course is teaching a selection of topics and petroleum engineering skills needed for the planning, development and operation of oil and gas fields and to understand, model and analyze their production performance. Topics typically covered in the course (with varying degrees of detail) are: life cycle of a hydrocarbon field, field development workflow, probabilistic reserve estimation, project economic evaluation, offshore field architectures and production systems, reservoir depletion and field performance, production and injection scheduling, flow assurance, flow design of boosting, field processing facilities, export product control and integrated asset modeling. The course will focus on developing digital competences and will include some aspects on CO2 injection systems, energy efficiency, emissions to air and sea, and skill transfer for the energy transition.

Learning outcome

Ingress: The students should understand the petroleum engineering aspects of planning, developing and operating oil and gas fields.

Knowledge: At the end of the term, students should understand the process of planning and developing offshore oil and gas fields and some petroleum engineering aspects that govern the operation of such fields. Students should be able to describe the lifecycle of oil and gas fields from discovery through the assessment phase, the development phase, field operations and abandonment. Students should be able to describe the most common offshore field architectures. Students should be able to describe, understand and explain the functionality of the main components of a production system. Students should understand the risks, uncertainties and economic factors involved in the development and operation of oil and gas fields. The students should understand the depletion performance of a production system, the fundamentals of flow equilibrium calculations and the flow performance of networks. Students should understand and recognize the decision variables, objectives and constraints involved in field planning.

Skills: At the end of the term, the student should be able to perform engineering calculations such as probabilistic estimation of reserves, NPV calculations, flow equilibrium in production systems, flow equilibrium in surface networks. Students should also be able to compute production/injection profiles using models of the reservoir and production/injection system, and to analyze applications of subsea boosting. Students should be able to define and set up simple optimization problems. Computational tools typically used during the course are Excel, Excel VBA, Gap, Prosper, MBAL, Hysys and Python. The students should be able to be self-critical and quality control their results, analyze them and perform sensitivity studies. The students should be able to develop their own computational tools to study simple cases or to use wisely and critically premade routines and simulators.

General competence: The student should be able to learn to solve engineering problems and develop and practice digital engineering skills such as modeling, programming and simulation. The student should be able to develop critical engineering thinking including energy and environmental aspects. The student should have a good starting point to apply the knowledge obtained to other areas such as re-use of oil and gas offshore facilities and CO2 injection systems. The student should be able to practice and develop written engineering communications skills.

Learning methods and activities

Lectures and compulsory exercises. The lectures and exercises will often relate to an offshore field in Norway (North Sea, Norwegian Sea or Barents Sea).

During the course the students will develop computational workflows and routines (typically using Excel sheets and Python). The students will also use some pre-made utilities and commercial simulators such as Hysys, Gap, Prosper.

The course is taught in English.

A reference group will be established to evaluate the teaching activities.

Compulsory assignments

• Exercises

Recommended previous knowledge

Knowledge of thermodynamics and fluid properties. Engineering courses in flow and process technology. Previous courses (2nd and 3rd year in the programme Petroleum Geoscience and Engineering, MTPETR) within reservoir engineering, drilling engineering, petroleum production and petrophysics.

Course materials

Given at semester start.

Credit reductions