Brain Deposit !!

In the recent visit to the USA while addressing a large crowd of the Indian diaspora of the Silicon Valley, Indian Prime Minister Sri Narendra Modi mentioned an interesting term - "Brain Deposit". For him, the flow of talents from India to other countries is not "Brain Drain", rather "Brain Deposit", that he hopes that one day will return to "Mother India" with interest, i.e. with enhanced expertise. That`s what he calls "Brain Gain With Interest". According to him, that day is perhaps now or in the very near future.

Does it apply only to the IT sector or to our Oil&Gas sector as well? The Indian E&P companies including Oil India and ONGCL have experienced "Brain Drain" for quite a long time. These companies groomed talents in various fields like geosciences, reservoir engineering, production engineering, drilling etc from the very nascent stage. They hire fresh graduates, often with degrees with no direct relevance to the industry and spends time, money and man-hours to train them. After working and gaining experience for few years, many of them leave the company and the country in search of better opportunities. The time, money and man-hours spent apparently goes down the drain. The expertise and skills imparted by the Indian companies are utilized later by the foreign companies. Are these "Brain Drain"  or "Deposit" ?  

Decide your Reservoir Engineering tool wisely....

Providing timely and sound technical "advice" to the management is one of the primary jobs of a Reservoir Engineer. "Advice" is like a product that Reservoir Engineers generate to assist management take effective decisions. These decisions in turn effects the financial health of the company.

With the limited time and resources, it is very important to decide the correct tool to be used to generate the correct and timely "advice". In order to justify a bigger financial commitment by the investors, a more rigorous and robust technique is required. However, more the robust and rigorous technique is, more data / information is demanded by the technique. A simpler technique can be used to obtain results in shorter time using less amount of data; however, the results may not be as reliable as a more complex method would yield.

There is a time element to the equation. With longer investment of man-days, a better results might be obtained. However, capability of the technique; quality and quantity of data play a limiting role to the robustness of the result. 

Figure-1

Figure-1 attempts to typical time duration required to carry out different RE studies and a relative complexity of the result that can be achieved from these techniques. It compares (a) Decline Curve Analysis, (b) Material Balance, (c) Streamline Simulation, and (d) Finite Difference Simulation.

Petroleum Engineering - Scopes & Future

From an Indian student's perspective:

Scope-wise, I must admit, it’s quite narrow…. only the petroleum industry (unless, he diversifies into IT/MBA/Civil Service etc.) In India, currently there are a number of institutes offering B.E./B.Tech in Petroleum Engineering; but no. of jobs for fresher’s seems to be not enough. For first few months after graduation, sometimes, a fresher may have to do some job hunting. Jobs for Indians outside India like in the middle-east or far-east is actually very good. However, everywhere, they want relevant experiences of 7+ years; almost rare to zero scopes for a fresher.

However, once ice-broken into the Petroleum Industry, one can have a wide range of options from drilling to production to reservoir to facilities.  He/she do faces competitions from candidates of other disciplines like mechanical, civil, chemical etc especially in drilling, production and facilities. However, as Petroleum Engineers are especially trained for the oil industry itself, it is easy to excel. One can command a highly paid, technically satisfying career in the industry.

Future-wise, I do not see any threat in the foreseeable future. As long as petroleum is not significantly replaced by other sources of energy, petroleum engineers will be in demand. Rather, as natural resources shrinks and demands expands, I foresee demands growing exponentially --- more so for expertise in areas like EOR, maginal fields and unconventional reserves.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend one to pursue petroleum engineer as a career.

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.

Who can become a Reservoir Engineer ?

Generally who studied "Petroleum Engineering" as his/her major discipline in undergraduate or gradate level becomes "Reservoir Engineer". Frequently, students majoring in Geoscience, Chemical Engineering are also seen engaged as "Reservoir Engineer"s. Students with other backgrounds, like mathematics, physics, mechanical or process engineering are also sometimes  seen as Reservoir Engineers. However, most of the time they undergo post graduate level training in Reservoir Engineering.

What is Reservoir Engineering?

"Reservoir Engineering" refers to the engineering discipline that deals with understanding the flow of fluids like gas, oil and water through the pore spaces of underground rocks and techniques to recover them in an economically efficient manner.