Reassessment of Petroleum Engineering Education: Is It the End of an Era or a New Start?

Since emerging more than a century ago, petroleum engineering (PE) education has increasingly kept its popularity despite significant downturns in the industry. During these downturn periods, observed at least four times since the 1973 oil crisis, structural changes in university programs have been considered. On the other hand, during the "heyday" periods, institutions have had to tackle enormous demand from industry, severely increased enrollments, and reestablish resources to provide a proper service. In light of these observations and while experiencing the fifth downturn period over the last five decades, it is time again to ask the same question: "Shall we continue with the same PE education model or radically shift to a new model?" In this paper, after reviewing more than fifty articles published over the last 85 years reporting the attempts made towards reshaping PE education, an option of restructuring PE programs is discussed. This option is less oil industry (and oil prices) dependent and more of a "general" engineering education program with an emphasis on the "geoscience" or "subsurface" engineering aspects of the PE discipline. Detailed discussions focus on curriculum updates to address the industry practice of "subsurface" related engineering applications. Viability of this option was discussed from industry, academia, and students’ perspective. This restructuring option requires substantial changes to curricula, skill development, and teaching and learning styles. Fundamentals are essential to include in PE education similar to other general (or major) engineering disciplines such as mechanical, civil, chemical, and electrical engineering. The essential elements of engineering skills such as creative design, decision making, problem description and solving, management under high degree of uncertainty, and data collection and processing for optimization are to be included in the new model. Finally, the model proposed is critically discussed and analyzed from different perspectives (industry, academia, and students) considering current and prospected subsurface engineering applications.

Q&A With Devon Energy It’s Time To Talk About IP Protection

Devon Energy considers its development of a new completions technology called Sealed Wellbore Pressure Monitoring (SWPM) to be one of the shale sector’s biggest breakthroughs in subsurface engineering. The approach to fracturing diagnostics represents a class of next-generation tools designed to make on-the-fly stimulation designs more practical than ever. But the innovation has done something else, too. It has raised old questions within a relatively new sector about the role of intellectual property (IP) protection. When SWPM was introduced to petrotechnicals outside of Devon, some initially questioned how or why the technique needed to be patented at all. The ingenuity behind SWPM could be boiled down to solving a math problem: How much fluid is pumped during the hydraulic fracturing treatment of one well before it travels across a known distance and applies pressure to the unperforated casing of a neighboring shut-in well? The ability to answer this question rapidly and with surety holds great value for any developer of multiwell pads. But, as some wondered, was this simply a formula that could be repeated and used as freely as a decade’s old equation found in a textbook? Was Devon being too protective over its discovery? Or was it simply being prudent? Earlier this year, Devon was granted a US patent for SWPM, the end of a process that began on a well pad in 2017. In the meantime, the company shared rights with other operators for field trials before striking a deal last summer with software developer Well Data Labs to market SWPM to the rest of the unconventional business. The drivers behind Devon’s IP strategy, what it learned while patenting SWPM, and what it hopes others in this space will take away from that experience are shared here by Chad Holeman, corporate counsel at Devon, and Kyle Haustveit, a co-inventor of SWPM and a subsurface engineering manager at Devon. JPT: Can you begin by explaining your philosophy around IP protection and how SWPM reflects that? Chad Holeman (CH): We talk about confidential and proprietary information with some degree of frequency. As an organization, I think that we’re further along on the spectrum of maturation as it relates to understanding what that means and safeguarding that information to the very best of our ability. One key is that you need to be able to differentiate trade secrets, or confidential proprietary information that you want to keep close to the vest, from the inventive concepts that you want to protect and can also commercialize, potentially monetize, or gain some other type of competitive advantage from. Inventive concepts such as SWPM fit that mold. Kyle Haustveit (KH): I think the concept of leaving value on the table is one of the biggest reasons we do this. A lot of operators have made massive investments into the digital revolution and multimillion-dollar investments into diagnostic programs to understand how we are breaking and draining the rock with our stimulations. Through all that have come a lot of new ideas.

Engineering geological investigations for evaluation of excavation method and stand-up time of the DK99-DK100 Jakarta – Bandung high-speed railway tunnel, Indonesia

This paper presents the investigation of surface geology and subsurface engineering geology to analyze the excavation method and stand-up time of the DK99-DK100 Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway Tunnel, Indonesia. Rock mass quality, tunnel excavation method, and stand-up time determined using Geological Strength Index (GSI), Basic Quality (BQ) systems, converted to Rock Mass Rating (RMR) and The Japan Society of Civil Engineering (JSCE) for comparison. The result shows that the study area consists of slightly to completely weathered andesite breccia and slightly weathered andesite lava. The rock masses at the tunnel elevation had very poor to poor quality and were associated with high weathering degrees. The recommended rock excavation method based on the GSI is digging. The recommended tunnel excavation method based on RMR is multiple drifts, top heading, and bench, while based on JSCE is bench cut method. The tunnel stand-up time is 30 minutes - 2 hours based on the RMR, while it is predicted to be unstable without support based on the BQ. The recommended design is expected to be applied effectively according to the geological conditions. It is expected to understand better the tunnel excavation method in poor rock masses, especially in Indonesia.

Earthquakes Influenced by Water

Injecting fluids in the crust, or their extraction, changes pore pressure and poroelastic stresses. Both pressure and stress changes can promote seismicity and, hence, the seismic events are called induced earthquakes. The filling of reservoirs on Earth’s surface can also induce earthquakes from some combination of surface loading and pore pressure changes. Attribution of any given earthquake to human activities, however, is not always straightforward. There remains debate about what controls the magnitude of induced earthquakes, the relative importance of pore pressure changes and poroelastic stresses, and how to best manage injection and extraction to minimize seismicity. As the scale and distribution of subsurface engineering expand globally, we should expect more and larger induced earthquakes in the future.

Digital Rock Physics: computation of hydrodynamic dispersion

Hydrodynamic dispersion is a crucial mechanism for modelling contaminant transport in subsurface engineering and water resources management whose determination remains challenging. We use Digital Rock Physics (DRP) to evaluate the longitudinal dispersion of a sandpack. From a three-dimensional image of a porous sample obtained with X-ray microtomography, we use the method of volume averaging to assess the longitudinal dispersion. Our numerical implementation is open-source and relies on a modern scientific platform that allows for large computational domains and High-Performance Computing. We verify the robustness of our model using cases for which reference solutions exist and we show that the longitudinal dispersion of a sandpack scales as a power law of the Péclet number. The assessment methodology is generic and applies to any kind of rock samples.

Surface and subsurface engineering geological mapping for empirical designs of excavation method and support system of Tunnel 6 of Jakarta-Bandung high speed railway, Indonesia

Empirical design of support system at the Tunnel 6 of the Jakarta – Bandung high-speed railway was based on the Basic Quality (BQ) system, which had not been adopted in Indonesia. This research was carried out to better understand the rock mass quality at the tunnel construction site by comparing rock mass quality determined by the BQ system to that determined by two more popular rock mass classifications, namely the Geological Strength Index (GSI) and Rock Mass Rating (RMR). Surface and subsurface engineering geological mapping were carried out and tunnel excavation method and support system were proposed. The engineering geological model of the BQ, GSI, and RMR systems showed that the sedimentary rock masses of the Miocene Jatiluhur Formation generally had poor to very poor quality, while those of the Quaternary Volcanic Formation had very poor to good quality. Based on the RMR, the stand-up time values of the sedimentary rock masses were predicted to be relatively low as compared with those of the Quaternary Volcanic Formation, implying requirement of a relatively quick support system installation after excavation. In general, a combination of systematic bolt, shotcrete and steel ribs is the recommended support system for this tunnel.

BIM-basierte digitale Transformation im Untertagebau anhand von zwei anwendungsorientierten Forschungsprojekten

ZusammenfassungEs gibt zahlreiche Publikationen, die die digitale Transformation im Tief- und Tunnelbau propagieren. Als Lösungsansatz wird dabei immer wieder Building Information Modeling (BIM) genannt und die Umsetzung der digitalen Transformation basierend auf dieser Methodik gefordert. Der prototypische Charakter eines Tunnelbauprojekts erschwert jedoch eine standardisierte Vorgehensweise. Hinzu kommt, dass die beteiligten Fachdisziplinen für unterschiedliche Gewerke individuelle Softwaretools mit proprietären (nicht standardisierten) Datenformaten nutzen. Durch diese in sich geschlossenen Datenmodelle ist eine offene BIM Arbeitsweise (Open BIM) nur schwer zu realisieren. Das hat der Lehrstuhl für Subsurface Engineering an der Montanuniversität Leoben zum Anlass genommen und zwei anwendungsorientierte Forschungsprojekte zur digitalen Transformation im Tief- und Tunnelbau lanciert, deren Inhalte in diesem Artikel kurz vorgestellt werden. Das „Zentrum am Berg (ZaB)“ dient in beiden Projekten als zentrale Infrastruktur zu Evaluierungszwecken.

Acoustic Emission Characteristics and Failure Prediction of the Granite with Orthogonal Cracks under Compressive Loading

Natural joints existing in rock significantly affect the stability of long-term served subsurface engineering. In this paper, granite specimens with two orthogonal cracks were made for uniaxial compressive tests. The acoustic emission monitoring (AE) and digital image correlation techniques were employed to record the acoustic events and cracking of rock. The stress, ring-down count, and cumulative ring-down count of AE during the tests were obtained. The b-value of AE was calculated based on the magnitude and number of AE events. The relationship between the b-value and rock cracking for the specimens with orthogonal cracks was discussed. Further, the effects of orthogonal cracks distribution on the b-value and rock cracking were investigated. Experimental results show that the specimens with orthogonal cracks would undergo multiple cycles of energy accumulation-release-reaccumulation-rerelease under the uniaxial compression. For the specimens with orthogonal cracks, the b-value of AE was volatile but generally decreased until complete failure. Every cracking event during the loading made the b-value drop and then the reaccumulation of energy made the b-value increase or stable. The specimen with orthogonal cracks was more prone to initial cracking than the intact rock. The orientation of cracks had effects on the b-value evolution and crack patterns. The b-value reaching about 1.5 can be used as the failure precursor of specimens with orthogonal cracks.