01 April 2008

The University of New South Wales’ School of Petroleum Engineering, in collaboration with the Australian oil and gas industry, opened a state-of-the-art drilling rig training facility in Perth on Monday, March 31.

The National Drilling and Well Control Program training facility is the first of its kind in Australia and South-East Asia and will provide essential training and certification for about 450 engineers and drilling rig professionals from Australia and overseas every year. Professor Sheik Rahman, from the School of Petroleum Engineering, said the $600,000 facility provided the same level of realistic training for oil and gas professionals as flight simulators provided for commercial pilots.

“This is a full-scale one-to-one simulator. What you will see on a drilling rig you will see on this facility,” he said.

With the oil and gas industry experiencing a dramatic shortage of qualified personnel, the UNSW School of Petroleum Engineering is playing a key role in training current and future engineers in addition to the industry’s other oil and gas professionals.

Oil and gas personnel must be certified every two years to work on drilling rigs/platforms (land and offshore). The new Perth facility covers three interconnected rooms and recreates the controls of a drilling platform. It replaces the computer-based “bench-top” simulators used previously. The facility will provide training in disaster response and how to conduct drilling operations as well as update the skills and knowledge of its training participants. Another full-scale simulator will be opened at UNSW’s Brisbane training facility later this year.

The National Drilling and Well Control Program is a joint project involving the UNSW School of Petroleum Engineering and the Australian oil and gas industry.

The training facility, at Technology Park in Bentley, WA, was opened by West Australian Minister for Energy, Resources, Industry and Enterprise Francis Logan.

Driller’s control panel of DS 5000.