Our department offers the M.S. degree in petroleum engineering and the PhD degree in chemical and petroleum engineering. The M.S. program requires 21 hours of courses, including five core courses and two elective courses. A total of 30 hours is required for the degree which includes 3 hours of seminar and 6 hours of research. A thesis is required. Students who do not have a petroleum engineering B.S. degree are required to take remedial courses in petroleum engineering and geology. A list of remedial courses is available on the CPE website. A variety of research projects are available, many under the Tertiary Oil Recovery Project, a major state funded research program at the University of Kansas. The TORP website www.torp.ku.edu contains descriptions of current and previous research projects.
The PhD program requires completion of 45 credit hours beyond the M.S. degree. Required are 18 hours of course work beyond the M.S. requirements, including 3 doctoral level courses in our department, two graduate courses related to the doctoral research project which may be taken in other departments at KU and preparation for the comprehensive examination. . Doctoral students are required to pass comprehensive examinations based on MS core courses or granted exemption based on grades received in MS core courses before becoming a PhD aspirant. PhD aspirants become PhD candidates after completing the comprehensive examination. The comprehensive examination is scheduled after the majority of the course work is completed. The median time to degree for our Ph.D. graduates in the period FY 2004 - FY 2006 is 5.1 years
The Tertiary Oil Recovery Project (TORP) is located in the Department and is directed by two CPE faculty (Don Green and Paul Willhite). TORP represents a strategically important cornerstone of our petroleum engineering research effort. The project attracts a significant proportion of our graduate student cohort both at MS and PhD levels. The main research thrusts include: Surfactant Flooding, Polymer Flooding, Gelled Polymer Technology, CO2 Miscible Flooding, Computer Modeling; Using Biosurfactants from agricultural waste streams for enhanced oil recovery (Jenn-Tai Liang); Modelling wax deposition in Alaska North Slope oil wells (Jenn-Tai Liang). Specific research interests include: Water Shutoff and Conformance Control, CO2 Sequestration in Geologic Formations, Enhanced Coalbed Methane Recovery (Jenn-Tai Liang), Oil and Gas Reservoir Simulation (Shapour Vossoughi).
At the present time, research projects are in progress in the following areas:
