Natural gas drilling sites, oilfield pumping equipment and rugged, remote office locations brought to life two years of scholarly books and orderly classrooms when 33 petroleum engineering students attended the Halliburton Camp Bevo in May. Thirty more students will make the oilfield their home for a week in late August.
The University of Texas at Austin Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering and Halliburton began the "intersession" program three years ago as a hands-on experience for undergraduate students that would complement classroom theory. For many participants it represented their first introduction to an actual oilfield outside of university laboratories.
Sophomores and juniors daily boarded vans with Petroleum and Geosystems Professors Tim Taylor and Paul Bommer to ride several hours to remote locations and view "frac" jobs as well as drilling, completion and production operations. The "greenhorns" wore green hard hats on jobsites as a safety measure to indicate their newness to the profession. By the end of the week, the oilfield immersion experience added oilfield slang to the 19-21-year-olds' everyday vocabulary.
Halliburton hosted the select group of students who qualified for the trip through top grades. The energy services company provided private dormitories and dining facilities at Halliburton's Energy Institute, located in Duncan, Oklahoma. In addition to the training facilities, the Institute includes a 9-hole golf course, swimming pool, and sport courts.
Halliburton's 200-plus-acre Duncan location also houses their technology center where engineers and scientists described their research to improve well-bore completion and stimulation techniques as well as improvements in down-hole equipment. The company's manufacturing plant in Duncan demonstrated how engineers transform their signature 1,250 horse power pumps from long rolls of grey iron and steel to its bright red workhorse of the oilfield. Engineers and master metal craftsmen gave hands-on demonstrations of the laser welding, heat sculpturing, and polarized painting as they produce a new pump truck every three days.
Officials from Marathon Oil, Devon Energy Corporation, H&P Drilling and Chesapeake Energy led tours on the field trips to actual oil drilling sites.
Each event allowed students to probe Professors Bommer and Taylor with more sophisticated questions and reach a fuller understanding of the petroleum engineering industry.
Photos available at http://www.engr.utexas.edu/news/action_shots/pages/200705291244.cfm
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The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering ranks among the top six public engineering schools in the United States. With the nation's fourth highest number of faculty elected members of the National Academy of Engineering, the School's more than 7,000 students gain exposure to the nation's finest engineering practitioners. Appropriately, the School's logo, an embellished checkmark used by the first UT engineering dean to denote high quality student work, is the nation's oldest quality symbol. The School maintains a Web site at http://www.engr.utexas.edu