Petroleum Engineering

Petroleum Engineering

▌ Petroleum Engineering

The Petroleum Engineering (PE) program at IIT Madras focuses on upstream activities of petroleum exploration and production with a strong emphasis on reservoir characterization through modelling as well as experimental studies.

The PE programme provides educational programs at the Master’s (M Tech & MS) and Doctoral (PhD) levels. The curriculum blends scientific and engineering fundamentals with mathematical and computer applications. The programme adds the flavours of fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer along with computational fluid dynamics to the petroleum engineering graduates.

The M Tech and MS students can upgrade their degree to Ph D upon successful completion of the degree conversion requirement. The PE programme also offers PhD as Part-time programme (for industrial people working in Chennai), External-programme (for Industrial experts working outside Chennai) and as Quality Improvement Programme (for teaching professionals).

Faculty members are active in research in a wide range of specialties within petroleum, including multi-phase fluid flow-through porous media, reservoir characterization, reservoir engineering, reservoir simulation, enhanced oil recovery, exploration and formation evaluation, seismic data acquisition and processing, petroleum geo-mechanics and offshore petroleum production. The programme also specializes on flow through fractured reservoirs; shale-gas reservoirs; CBM reservoirs; CO2 Sequestration and hydraulic-fracturing.

The PE programme is developing a broad computational base in reservoir simulation and petroleum geo-mechanics and the programme has an explicit reservoir simulation laboratory and petroleum geo-mechanics laboratory.

The PE programme growing under the umbrella of ocean engineering takes the advantage of blending the essential flavours of ocean engineering along with petroleum engineering by offering courses that include offshore drilling, deep water drilling technology, offshore oil and gas production practices, offshore oil spill and geo-mechanics applied to offshore petroleum.

The PE doctoral students from this programme have been placed at leading academic institutions in PE including IIT(ISM)-Dhanbad, IIPE-Vizag and RGIPT-Jais.

The PE MS & M Tech students from this programme have been placed at reputed industrial firms including Shell, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger and ONGC.

According to the data released by QS in 2021, IIT-Madras is at number 30 for its Petroleum Engineering (PE) programme.