Pennsylvania's pivotal place in the modern petroleum and natural gas industry began along the banks of Oil Creek near Titusville, Pennsylvania. On August 27, 1859, Edwin L. Drank completed a 69.5'-deep oil well that quickly stimulated a boom for the industry. Today, petroleum and natural gas produce over 3,000 products ranging from transportation fuels and petrochemicals to electricity and heating fuel for homes and businesses. Penn State houses the nation's longest petroleum and natural gas research program and is one of only a few universities in the northeast to offer a Ph.D. program in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering.
Research
- Gas flooding and surfactant flooding for enhanced oil recovery
- Microbe and CO2-enhanced oil recovery
- New generation reservoir engineering analysis tools for performance prediction of unconventional natural gas reservoirs
- Well test analysis in ultra-tight and double porosity systems
- Performance prediction of shale gas and oil reservoirs using artificial expert systems (ANN)
- ANN-based field development tools
- Fluid flow modeling and experiments in coalbed methane reservoirs
- Trapping and leakage mechanisms during geologic carbon storage
- Digital rock physics and pore-scale transport mechanisms in reservoir environments
- Hydraulic fracturing technology
- Simulation of complex, multi-lateral well configurations
- Paradoxical behavior and maldistribution in natural gas transportation systems
- Salting/scale mechanisms, diagnosis, and solutions
- Hydrocarbon recovery from mineral matter