The Capstone Class of Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering (MPGE) is a comprehensive and integrated reservoir assessment experience by applying knowledge and skills that undergraduate students have learned throughout the curriculum at MPGE. Results are delivered by teams in oral presentations and written reports.
For a typical project, students are grouped by five individuals divided by their roles as geologist, petrophysist, reservoir engineer, production engineer, drilling & completion (D&C) engineer, and one of them serves as the captain for the team. The team usually starts from accessing an area of interest (AOI) by evaluating social/environmental backgrounds. A very important task is to study the infrastructure and market for oil/gas storage and transportation as well as wastewater disposal. In the next stage, the team will look into the big picture from geological deposition and study petrophysics via well logging data from which cross-sections and isopach maps will be generated. The geological and petrophysical study provides information to evaluated original hydrocarbon in place with uncertainty evaluation through Monte Carlo simulation. By studying the well D&C best practices in the same area, the D&C engineer will design the well in detail and propose D&C costs. The reservoir engineer focuses on drive mechanism, fluid characterization, and work together with the production engineer to predict the ultimate recovery, do economic analysis and evaluation, and categorize reserves using SPE Petroleum Reserves Management System (PRMS). Finally, based upon the findings from each individual member, the team come up with a bidding heat map of the AOI.
The course is usually led by a group of instructors with different expertise and they usually serve as consultants to help students define the scope of work, guide technical solutions, fine-tune their presentation skills. In this semester, Mr. John Ritz, and Drs. Rai, Teodoriu, and Wu participated as instructors. “Many students in past semesters said they have learned the most from this course.”, Dr. Xingru Wu said, “we mainly want the students to apply what they have learned in the curriculum to solve real problems, which involves using the most recent software and learning from peers through collaboration”.
