A donation worth more than $1.7 million from the engineering firm Petroleum Experts (known as Petex) will allow students at Missouri University of Science and Technology to learn from the latest in petroleum engineering software tools.

Headquartered in Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, Petex has developed a suite of engineering software designed to improve the efficiency of oil and gas fields.

Petex has granted a license to Missouri S&T to use the petroleum engineering company’s Integrated Production Modeling suite. The software has a commercial value of $1,717,820.

“These petroleum engineering software tools are the standard across the worldwide oil and gas industry and are currently used by more than 350 oil and gas companies,” says Dr. Hamid Guedroudj, Petex’s technical director. “By incorporating these tools in the curriculum, Missouri S&T will make sure their petroleum engineering students have access to the latest and most widely used software in the industry.”

“Missouri S&T’s petroleum engineering program currently uses Petex software in production engineering, completions and artificial lift courses as well as graduate research,” says Dr. Shari Dunn-Norman, associate professor of petroleum engineering at Missouri S&T. “With this software gift, the full suite of programs will now enhance our capabilities in reservoir engineering and the geosciences.”

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 optimize production for existing oil and gas fields and assist with the system design of new fields.

Dunn-Norman adds that the donation will help students gain the skills necessary for their future. “This is the leading software in nodal analysis and production optimization from wellbore to surface pipelines and it is vital that our students are experienced in using it,” says Dunn-Norman.

The Petex software will be used by more than 200 petroleum engineering students at Missouri S&T, as well as geology and geophysics students, says Dunn-Norman. S&T’s petroleum engineering program is integrated with the geosciences programs, she adds.

S&T students will have access to the full Integrated Production Modeling suite, which consists of the following:

• PVTP, which predicts the effect of process conditions on the composition of hydrocarbon mixtures and fluid characterization
• MBAL, an analytical reservoir tool commonly used for modeling the fluid dynamic reservoir effects and material balance.
• REVEAL, which is designed to study specialized reservoir effects and assess their impact on the injection, production and enhanced oil recovery from the reservoir, capturing the thermal, rock mechanics and chemistry.
• PROSPER, a design and optimization program for modeling most types of oil and gas well configurations.
• GAP, a multiphase oil and gas optimizer that models the surface gathering pipeline network of field production systems. GAP integrates dynamically the reservoir model (MBAL) and well models (PROSPER).
• RESOLVE, a field engineering development tool that manages and control the IPM suite, Reservoir Simulators, Process Simulators to dynamically model, optimise and provide production forecasts of field operating scenarios. RESOLVE enables coupling of most major industry reservoir, process and economics simulation model to better evaluate and operate oil and gas fields.

“We’re very thankful to Petex for their generous donation and their support of Missouri S&T’s petroleum engineering program,” says Dr. Ralph E. Flori Jr., Gulf Oil Professor and Chair of geological sciences and engineering. “This donation will help equip our students for their future careers because the software is so widely used in the oil and gas industry.”