Petroleum engineers design and develop methods for extracting oil and gas from deposits below the earths surface. Petroleum engineers also find new ways to extract oil and gas from older wells.
Duties Petroleum engineers typically do the following:
Design equipment to extract oil and gas in the most profitable way
Develop ways to inject water, chemicals, gases, or steam into an oil reserve to force out more of the oil
Develop plans to drill in oil and gas fields, and then to recover the oil and gas
Make sure that wells, well testing, and well surveys are completed and evaluated
Use computer-controlled drilling or fracturing to connect a larger area of an oil and gas deposit to a single well