Old UL Oil Well tapped for learning
If there's any crude left to pump from the UL oil well on Rex Street, Randy Andrus should know by early this afternoon.
It's because on Monday morning Andrus, lab manager for UL's petroleum engineering department, reactivated the rusty 45-year-old pump that lay dormant for more than 40 years.
With the help of oilfield service company FloQuip, Inc., Andrus wanted to give UL students a working well to learn from first-hand. Very few U.S. universities with a petroleum engineering major have an actual well near students, Andrus said, and any that do have probably retired it.
"This is going to give them the opportunity to actually see something live," he said. "All petroleum engineers are going to be exposed to this in the real world."
A petroleum engineers are like the quarterbacks of the drilling team. In addition to needing to know complex math and geology for oil exploration, they should know a rig backwards and forwards to assign tasks for everyone on their team, Andrus said. Contact with a campus well will help that.
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