Preface

The advances in the digital computing technology in the last decade have revolutionized the petroleum industry. Using the modern computer technologies, todays petroleum production engineers work much more efficiently than ever before in their daily activities, including analyzing and optimizing the performance of their existing production systems and designing new production systems. During several years of teaching the production engineering courses in academia and in the industry, the authors realized that there is a need for a textbook that reflects the current practice of what the modern production engineers do. Currently available books fail to provide adequate information about how the engineering principles are applied to solving petroleum production engineering problems with modern computer technologies. These facts motivated the authors to write this new book. This book is written primarily for production engineers and college students of senior level as well as graduate level. It is not authors intention to simply duplicate general information that can be found from other books. This book gathers authors experiences gained through years of teaching courses of petroleum production engineering in universities and in the petroleum industry. The mission of the book is to provide production engineers a handy guideline to designing, analyzing, and optimizing petroleum production systems. The original manuscript of this book has been used as a textbook for college students of undergraduate and graduate levels in Petroleum Engineering. This book was intended to cover the full scope of petroleum production engineering. Following the sequence of oil and gas production process, this book presents its contents in eighteen chapters covered in four parts. Part I contains eight chapters covering petroleum production engineering fundamentals as the first course for the entry-level production engineers and undergraduate students. Chapter 1 presents an introduction to the petroleum production system. Chapter 2 documents properties of oil and natural gases that are essential for designing and analysing oil and gas production systems. Chapters 3 through 6 cover in detail the performance of oil and gas wells. Chapter 7 presents techniques used to forecast well production for economics analysis. Chapter 8 describes empirical models for production decline analysis. Part II includes three chapters presenting principles and rules of designing and selecting the main components of petroleum production systems. These chapters are also written for entry-level production engineers and undergraduate students. Chapter 9 addresses tubing design. Chapter 10 presents rule of thumbs for selecting components in separation and dehydration systems. Chapter 11 details principles of selecting liquid pumps, gas compressors, and pipelines for oil and gas transportation. Part III consists of three chapters introducing artificial lift methods as the second course for the entry-level production engineers and undergraduate students. Chapter 12 presents an introduction to the sucker rod pumping system and its design procedure. Chapter 13 describes briefly gas lift method. Chapter 14 provides an over view of other artificial lift methods and design procedures. Part IV is composed of four chapters addressing production enhancement techniques. They are designed for production engineers with some experience and graduate students. Chapter 15 describes how to identify well problems. Chapter 16 deals with designing acidizing jobs. Chapter 17 provides a guideline to hydraulic fracturing and job evaluation techniques. Chapter 18 presents some relevant information on production optimisation techniques. Since the substance of this book is virtually boundless in depth, knowing what to omit was the greatest difficulty with its editing. The authors believe that it requires many books to describe the foundation of knowledge in petroleum production engineering. To counter any deficiency that might arise from the limitations of space, the book provides a reference list of books and papers at the end of each chapter so that readers should experience little difficulty in pursuing each topic beyond the presented scope. Regarding presentation, this book focuses on presenting and illustrating engineering principles used for designing and analyzing petroleum production systems rather than in-depth theories. Derivation of mathematical models is beyond the scope of this book, except for some special topics. Applications of the principles are illustrated by solving example problems. While the solutions to some simple problems not involving iterative procedures are demonstrated with stepwise calculations, complicated problems are solved with computer spreadsheet programs. The programs can be downloaded from the publishers website (http://books.elsevier.com/companions/ 9780750682701 ). The combination of the book and the computer programs provides a perfect tool kit to petroleum production engineers for performing their daily work in a most efficient manner. All the computer programs were written in spreadsheet form in MS Excel that is available in most computer platforms in the petroleum industry. These spreadsheets are accurate and very easy to use. Although the U.S. field units are used in the companion book, options of using U.S. field units and SI units are provided in the spreadsheet programs. This book is based on numerous documents including reports and papers accumulated through years of work in the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The authors are grateful to the universities for permissions of publishing the materials. Special thanks go to the Chevron and American Petroleum Institute (API) for providing Chevron Professorship and API Professorship in Petroleum Engineering throughout editing of this book. Our thanks are due to Mr. Kai Sun of Baker Oil Tools, who made a thorough review and editing of this book. The authors also thank Malone Mitchell III of Riata Energy for he and his companys continued support of our efforts to develop new petroleum engineering text and professional books for the continuing education and training of the industrys vital engineers. On the basis of the collective experiences of authors and reviewer, we expect this book to be of value to the production engineers in the petroleum industry. Dr. Boyun Guo Chevron Endowed Professor in Petroleum Engineering University of Louisiana at Lafayette June 10, 2006