Petroleum engineering is central to safe, efficient and sustainable development of oil and gas assets to meet global energy and resource demands.

Since its establishment in 1975, the Institute of GeoEnergy Engineering (IGE) at Heriot-Watt University has delivered its internationally renowned petroleum engineering MSc programme, providing thousands of graduates with the knowledge and skills to tackle the oil and gas industry’s most challenging problems across the globe. The programme offers an interdisciplinary approach to exploration and extraction of petroleum resources. Petroleum Engineering at Heriot-Watt is ranked 10th in the world, 3rd in the UK. 

Students on the Petroleum Engineering MSc undertake eight taught courses and two projects.

• Behaviour of reservoir rocks, fluid properties, reserve estimation, fluid flow through porous rocks and drive mechanisms.
• Introduction to geoscience in order to understand the terminology used by geoscientists, to use geoscience data to calculate the volume of hydrocarbons in the subsurface.
• Fundamental concepts and techniques used in drilling engineering, design requirements of well planning and construction, optimise the design of a drilling program.
• Petrophysical analysis of wireline log data, different tools and their uses, interpretation of logs and reservoir zonation.
• Predicting reservoir dynamic behaviour: theoretical, numerical and practical flow simulation for history matching and forecasting.
• Economic concepts involved in project evaluation; asset value, risk management, making informed decisions and screening and ranking of projects.

Masters (MSc) level entry applicants must have one of the following:

• Minimum of 2:2 honours degree or equivalent academic qualification in a related subject area.
•  For postgraduate conversion courses, non-related degrees will be considered.
• Corporate (or chartered) membership of relevant professional institutions will also be considered
• If English is not the applicant’s first language a minimum of IELTS 6.5 or equivalent is required with all elements passed at 6.0 or above.