I have a large number of goals this year. They’re possibly spiraling out of control. And there are a couple that I don’t know how to achieve yet. One of those goals was to increase my knowledge around the  oil and gas industry. I’d had a look around at the time of setting my goals and nothing had turned up of interest on the MOOC sites I’d checked. Living in Perth I figured there would be some good summary classes that I might be able to pay for at a local university but those seemed more targeted at specific course areas. I left the goal and moved on.

So when an email “New Stanford Online Learning Opportunities!” lobbed into my account I was pleasantly surprised to see a course on Reservoir Geomechanics.

This class has a focus on what is called the upstream component which includes exploration and production – getting the stuff out of the earth. Upstream is the component that my clients focus on and therefore what I work in day to day. (The other two streams are midstream – the processing and transportation, and downstream – the refining, distribution and selling of the product to consumers.) The courses main focus is around:

..rock mechanics, structural geology, earthquake seismology and petroleum engineering to address a wide range of geomechanical problems that arise during the exploitation of oil and gas reservoirs

Sounds thrilling yeah!

i’m not evening finished with lecture one yet but I’m already getting a better idea on what information assets are produced through the process and those are likely to come up in the roll out we are completing this year for my major client. I’m not sure if we’ll end up storing as much of the content for exploration and drilling as it can be fairly application specific but it’s interesting none the less.

I’m going to keep an Accredible cert again to track my learning and use XMind to record my class notes as I’ve found these very helpful in the past. A new addition to this course is that I’ve already started a glossary which I’ll eventually post to here – there’s so many industry specific words that I need to get my head around.

Happy learning everyone.