Why the world needs more petroleum engineers

Many workers today are disillusioned with their jobs, thinking they exist as spectators and not movers or changers. Petroleum engineers might be exempt from this feeling—they impact people’s lives in a big way. They extract and refine hydrocarbons to turn them into energy, which fuels industrial, commercial, and domestic activity. Petroleum engineers are easily classified as “movers.”

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Energy is a big part of people’s lives, and with more sophisticated technology, it even forms an insatiable need. Workers in the energy sector are so indispensable in the industry that a shortage of them would be catastrophic. Petroleum engineers are highly skilled and difficult to replace without attendant reforms in tertiary educational systems. The high level of specialization in their line of work --- manifested in both their formation and on-the-job training --- makes their position unique and difficult to fill. At the core of the responsibility of a petroleum engineer is ensuring abundant energy production with little environmental impact. This is what makes petroleum engineering a career for the highly skilled.

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Becoming a petroleum engineer is easier said than done. A petroleum engineer should have ample knowledge from a wide range of disciplines ranging from mathematics, geology, physics, and chemistry to create better and more efficient systems of harnessing hydrocarbon energy to bring about a balance between cheap abundant energy and a clean and safe environment.

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More about petroleum engineers and how they make things work can be found in Ali Ghalambor’s book, Petroleum Production Engineering, A Computer-Assisted Approach. More information about the author can be found at this Twitter page.

New methods for detecting fuel adulteration

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Fuel adulteration is a big problem that is caused by both greed and high fuel taxes. It works this way: Disreputable fuel stations often mix higher-priced diesel and gasoline products with cheap hydrocarbons or even solvents. These “dirty fuels” not only affect the drivability of automobiles but also harm the environment with increased tailpipe emissions. Thus, detecting adulterated fuel is important, especially at the distribution point.

The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) International developed some methods to improve the detection of adulterated fuels and fuel quality. These include the following:

- Density test. This involves the use of hydrometers and digital densitometers to measure the density of the fuel sample. As fuel products and hydrocarbons have different densities, it is easy to find out whether the fuel sample is adulterated or not.

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- Distillation test. This utilizes the different boiling points of different liquids in the fuel sample to determine whether the fuel is pure or not.

- Evaporation test. This makes use of evaporation techniques to detect fuel adulteration.

However, as most of these methods are not suitable for field use and have poor sensitivity when used to detect the extent of adulteration, a new technique was developed: adulteration detection by ultrasound. As the viscosity and density properties of fuel change during adulteration, the speed of sound in the adulterated fuel will be different when compared to that in the unadulterated fuel.

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Since millions of people use automobiles every day, detecting fuel adulteration is very important to decrease the degradation of a vehicle’s drivability and reduce harmful emissions.

Dr. Ali Ghalambor has written countless books on natural gas and petroleum engineering. Visit this Facebook page for more industry-related news and articles.