Fundamentals of Petroleum Production Engineering
A well doesn’t produce on its own terms — it produces according to the physics connecting the reservoir, the wellbore, and the surface facility, and production engineers are the ones who make sense of that chain. Burraq Consulting’s course builds that foundation quickly, giving junior engineers and field staff the working knowledge to read a well’s performance and start making sound production decisions.
What Is Petroleum Production Engineering?
Petroleum production engineering covers everything that happens to hydrocarbons between the reservoir and the sales point — well inflow performance, completion design, artificial lift, surface facility interface, and the ongoing work of optimizing and troubleshooting well output over the field’s life. It sits at the intersection of reservoir engineering (what the reservoir can deliver) and facility operations (what the surface system can handle), translating both into how a well should actually be produced.
Who Should Attend
- Junior production engineers building their core technical foundation
- Field engineers moving from operations into a production engineering role
- Operations staff who need to understand production engineering concepts to work effectively with engineering teams
Prerequisites
An engineering degree is preferred. Prior exposure to basic reservoir or well concepts is helpful but not required — the course builds the necessary foundation before moving into applied production engineering topics.
What the Course Covers
- Production engineering's scope, and how it interfaces with reservoir engineering upstream and facility operations downstream
- Inflow and outflow performance relationships (IPR/VLP), and how their intersection determines a well's deliverability
- Well completion types and how completion design decisions affect long-term production performance
- Production optimization techniques for maximizing output from existing wells and facilities
- Decline curve analysis fundamentals for forecasting future production and estimating remaining reserves
- Common production problems — scale, wax, asphaltene deposition, and sand production — and practical mitigation approaches
- Reading and interpreting well test and production data to diagnose performance issues
Course at a Glance
Why Train with Burraq Consulting
Burraq Consulting’s instructors bring direct field production experience from upstream operations across the region, and this course is grounded in the production problems engineers actually run into — scale buildup no one caught in time, a well whose IPR curve doesn’t match its test data — rather than staying at the level of textbook equations.
Certification and Next Steps
This course builds the core production engineering foundation for further specialization. It pairs naturally with Burraq Consulting’s Reservoir Engineering & Simulation Basics, Artificial Lift Systems, and Surface Production Facilities Operations courses.
Frequently Asked Questions
Reservoir engineering focuses on understanding and forecasting reservoir behavior — how much hydrocarbon is in place and how it will be recovered over time. Production engineering focuses on getting that hydrocarbon efficiently from the reservoir to the sales point through the wellbore and surface facilities.
No prior reservoir engineering background is required, though basic familiarity helps. The course introduces the reservoir-side concepts production engineers need without assuming a full reservoir engineering foundation.
It covers completion types and their impact on production performance at a working level, giving participants the context to collaborate effectively with completions specialists rather than a full completions design curriculum.
It’s a strong foundation for roles in production engineering, production optimization, and well performance analysis, and pairs well with more specialized courses in artificial lift and reservoir engineering.
Give your production engineers the foundation they need to hit the ground running.
or contact us to arrange an in-house program for your team.