£900K Software Donation Gives Students a Head-Start for Careers in the Oil and Gas Industry

A donation worth more than £900k from engineering firm Petroleum Experts is allowing students at the University of Aberdeen (UK) to get to grips with the latest in petroleum engineering software tools.

Petroleum Experts (known as Petex) is a petroleum engineering company, headquartered in Edinburgh, which has developed a set of engineering software designed to improve the efficiency of oil and gas fields.

It has granted a licence to the University to use its Integrated Production Modelling suite – which has a commercial value of £981,000.

The petroleum engineering software tools are the standard across the worldwide oil and gas industry and used by more than 350 oil and gas companies.

The Petex engineering models capture the physics, geology, engineering and fluid thermodynamics to model full production systems - from reservoir, the oil and gas wells, to the surface pipeline system and process.

These models once built are used to optimise production for existing oil and gas fields and assist with the system design of new fields.

Gao, Chang Hong, Lecturer in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Engineering, said the donation would assist students in gaining the skills necessary for future careers in the oil and gas industry.

He said: “We founded the petroleum program at the University of Aberdeen three years ago. Now the level 3 petroleum engineering students will enter their specialties and undertake courses in reservoir and production engineering.

“The Petex Integrated Production Modelling suite includes PROSPER – a design and optimisation program for modelling most types of oil and gas well production and GAP – a multiphase oil and gas optimiser that models the surface gathering pipeline network of field production systems.

“This is the leading software in nodal analysis and production optimisation from wellbore to surface pipelines and it is vital that our students are experienced in using it.

“The Petex software is going to be used in the level 4 projects for petroleum engineering students. More than 30 MSc students in Oil and Gas engineering will also likely apply the software tool in their thesis. The practical training in Petex software will give students advantages in their future careers because the software is so widely used in the oil and gas industry. “