Nanotechnology and the effect on petroleum engineering education and research

Nanotechnology is an emerging technology with the potential to effect revolutionary changes in several aspects of the oil and gas industry such as exploration, drilling, production, enhanced oil recovery, refining and processing. The importance of this emerging technology in petroleum industry presents a special challenge and opportunity to restructure teaching and nurture the scientific and workplace of the 21th century. This paper presents an overview of application of nanotechnology in the oil and gas industry to assess the importance and the potential technical benefits of this new emerging technology in petroleum industry. As a consequence of this rapid development and board impact of nanotechnology, education and training of new generation of engineering workplace, will play an important role in petroleum industry. In this regard, the effort to meet such demand while appropriately addressing and improving collaboration between the industry and academia, there is a strong need to introduce nanoscience technology into existing petroleum curriculum program. It is hoped that this work would be beneficial to both petroleum engineering education and research and will stimulate some idea for academics who may faced themselves with the developing education course and teaching nanotechnology in the near future. (author)