Who works with Reservoir Engineers?

Reservoir Engineers can not work in isolation. He/she needs support from a wide range of people of different backgrounds. Similarly, the output or work generated by a Reservoir Engineer might be used by another group of diversed people. In this article, an attempt will be made to describe some of these people working hand-in-hand with Reservoir Engineers.

Geologist: A geologist tries to identify and then tries to understand the subsurface rock where hydrocarbon is accumulated. He/she try to understand the shape and size of the rock volume containing oil & gas. Then he/she estimates various parameters like porosity, permeability etc their variations across the reservoir.

Geophysicist: A Geophysicist is like a "radiologist" taking and analyzing Ultrasounds. He/she conducts "seismic survey" and then analyse and interpret them in an attempt to identify the different subsurface rock layers. 

Petrophysicist: A petrophysicist looks at measurements taken from inside a well called "logs" and attempts to understand the rock and fluid surrounding the well.

Drilling Engineers: Without drilling a well, one can not recover oil and gas from the underground reservoir. A Drilling Engineer consults geologists and reservoir engineer to identify targets and accordingly designs a well.

Petroleum Engineer / Technologist: Once a well has been drilled, the hardware inside the well are designed and looked after by a Petroleum Engineer/Technologist, whom we fondly call as "P.Tech". He/she designs, installs and maintains, production tubings, artificial lift equipment, well-head, x-mass tree etc.

Production Engineer: A production engineer takes care of the produced fluid. Either though pipelines or by tankers, he transports it to a facility where it can be processed to make it suitable for a refinery, where crude oil is converted or refined to various consumable fluids like petrol, diesel and other by-products like plastics, lube oil etc.

Facilities / Process Engineer: The designing of the surface facilities like oil-water separator, pumps, compressors, degaser, desander; planning / designing the offshore platform and their layout etc are carried out my these people.