The Fifth SPE Colloquium on Petroleum Engineering Education (CPEE),, held 23–28 July 2000, was a very successful gathering of educators, technical leaders, engineers, and scientists from academia, industry, and government. The purpose was to address the critical issue of industry-university-government partnership in education, technology development, and technology transfer. The ultimate goal was to identify ways to develop the engineers and technology that the industry will need for the future. This paper reports the consensus of the Colloquium pertaining to:the industry's current expectations for new petroleum engineering graduates (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) andthe future of research and development (R&D) activity in academia. Other subjects such as petroleum engineering education, curricula, technology transfer, and ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) issues are presented in a companion paper. In the context of this paper, academia refers to the U.S. petroleum engineering schools, and industry means the upstream segment of the U.S. petroleum industry. While this presentation has a U.S. framework, some findings may certainly apply globally elsewhere. Introduction According to Webster's dictionary, university is an institution of higher learning providing facilities for teaching and research. Teaching and research were the main subjects discussed at the CPEE. As for teaching, the academia (and specifically the petroleum engineering schools) has done an outstanding job of educating students in the technical subjects. The majority of students are technically well prepared to work in the industry. However, the fast-changing needs of the industry require that petroleum engineering students be prepared for current business issues, and be able to contribute to the corporate success and profitability from the start. As far as research is concerned, the academia have always been the cradle of fundamental research, but more and more, there is a great need for academic research to include solutions pertaining to the immediate needs of the industry. This issue is even more critical because of the vacuum created by the closing of several U.S. research and technology centers in the petroleum industry. From a historical perspective, both industry and government have funded research projects in the academia. In turn, academia has used the funds to support graduate students in conducting primarily reservoir management related basic research. Today, because of the pressure to cut costs, the slow pace at which research results are produced, and in many cases the non-relevance of research results to the industry's immediate needs, industry's sponsorship of academic research in the U.S. has diminished. Furthermore, according to a government publication, longer-term research has been curtailed, reflecting the inability of the companies to capture economic benefits of such investments. 1
Kennedy, H.T., Member AIME, Texas A and M U., College Station, Tex., Bowman, C.H.,* Member AIME, Gulf Research and Development Co., Pittsburgh, Pa., Crownover, A.N., Junior Member AIME, Humble Oil and Refining Co., Pleasanton, Texas, Miesch, E.P., Junior Member AIME, Continental Oil Co., Ponca City, Okla. Abstract The paper presents correlations ofmolar volume of gaseous hydrocarbon mixtures with pressure, temperature, composition and properties of the C7-plus fraction;shrinkage of oils during flash and differential liberation of gas, including the calculation of formation volume factor under various conditions; andbubble-point pressure with temperature, composition and characteristics of C7-plus. The data on which the correlations are based comprise 1,615 measurements on 900 hydrocarbon systems, including numerous systems containing nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide. In each correlation, the number of data points covered and the accuracy is substantially greater than in previously available work. Thus, the equation yielding molar volumes of gases has an average deviation of 2.04 per cent, applied to mixtures having temperatures up to 313F and pressures up to 9,800 psia, compared to 2.37 per cent for the Benedict-Webb-Rubin equation applied to the same data, and 4.53 per cent for the method based on the law of corresponding states. The equations presented are all explicit in the dependent variable, and require no iteration on the digital computer. Introduction The ease and accuracy of determining the composition of hydrocarbon mixtures, compared to the difficulty of measuring their properties under reservoir conditions, makes it desirable to utilize composition as the key to physical behavior to the greatest possible extent. As a result, there are available correlations between composition, or easily measured characteristics dependent on composition, and practically every important engineering property of reservoir fluids. The task confronting us is one of finding more exact relationships between important variables rather than extending correlations to new properties. This paper describes new correlations of molar volumes of gases, formation volume factors, and bubble-point pressures with composition, temperature and where possible, pressure. Each correlation is obtained by employing a sufficiently large amount of data so the calculated properties are probably as least as accurate as the measurement on which they are based. MOLAR VOLUME OF GASES Although many equations of state have been proposed for pure gases, only a few methods are applicable to hydrocarbons at conditions comparable to those in petroleum reservoirs. Still fewer are useful in describing the behavior of mixtures, with which the petroleum engineer is largely concerned. The correlation presented here involves procedures similar to those of Alani and Kennedy. The van der Waals equation ....................(1) is modified to make a and b functions of temperature instead of being constants for each material. This is a cubic equation, which may have either one or three real roots. The lowest root corresponds to liquid volume, while the highest applies to gas. When the procedure was applied to 703 pressure-temperature points of 164 gases of known composition and volume, the average deviation was 12.08 per cent, and the standard deviation 8.15. The above calculations were made using the constants derived for liquids by Alani and Kennedy and the mixture equation developed by them. A closer approximation to measured molar volumes is obtained by employing different sets of constants for different areas on the pressure-temperature chart, and by changing the relationship between am and bm for mixtures and the ai and bi for individual hydrocarbons. The various sets are shown in Table 1, and the areas for which they are recommended are plotted in Figs. 1 through 7. In these figures, the area designated by zero is in the critical region for pure materials, and the values obtained for them may be unreliable. JPT P. 1105ˆ
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