ENGINEERING THE PETROLEUM EDUCATION: AN INDUSTRIAL APPROACH CAPSTONE PROJECT EXPERIENCE

Engineering capstone project provides opportunity for graduating students to integrate knowledge gained throughout their undergraduate curriculum and serves as an integrated platform to demonstrate professionalism in solving complex engineering problems. In addition, the project work also serves as a platform for acquiring transferrable skills such as team work, communication and lifelong learning. However, there are few literature written about the capstone project for petroleum engineering program only. Therefore, a large scale oil and gas field development project based on a real case study which demands a creative solution encompassing four major petroleum engineering disciplines: formation evaluation, reservoir engineering, drilling engineering, production technology, and other sub disciplines was introduced as a capstone project course in the petroleum engineering curriculum. A significant feature of the project was the implementation of an original technical concept based on industrial approach. The organizational aspects are also discussed in view of the assessment quality and project competency requirements. Although some complications were met throughout the semester, the concept proved to be a very valuable exercise in simulating the working environment of petroleum engineers, in addition to providing experience in writing and presenting a comprehensive, contextualized, and realistic project proposal.