About the Department

Energy resources engineers are concerned with the design of processes for energy recovery. Included in the design process are characterizing the spatial distribution of hydrocarbon reservoir properties, drilling wells, designing and operating production facilities, selecting and implementing methods for enhancing fluid recovery, examining the environmental aspects of petroleum exploration and production, monitoring reservoirs, and predicting recovery process performance.

Faculty and graduate students conduct research in areas including: enhanced oil recovery by thermal means, gas injection, and the use of chemicals; flow of fluids in pipes; geostatistical reservoir characterization and mathematical modeling; geothermal engineering; natural gas engineering; carbon sequestration optimization; properties of petroleum fluids; reservoir simulation using computer models; and well test analysis.

The department is housed in the Green Earth Sciences Building and it operates laboratories for research in enhanced oil recovery processes and geothermal engineering. Students have access to a variety of computers for research and course work. Computers available for instruction and research include ten multiprocessor NT servers within the department, as well as campus-wide computer clusters. Each graduate student office has one 3 GHz Pentium 4 computer per student.

You can view an 8 min. video about the department by following one of the following links: