[fossil_fuel]

i'm a freshman college student majoring in geology. courses in fluid mechanics and hydrology not a requirement for the major, but should i take them anyways if i'm interesting in becoming a petroleum geologist? i realize such courses are necessary for petroleum engineering or reservoir engineering, but i'm more interested in the exploration side of the business. if it's not really necessary, i'd prefer not to take these courses because they have many prerequisite courses which i would not otherwise take.

i will ask the faculty here as well, but our geology department is geared towards earthquake/volcano research and not petroleum or mineral exploration, so i was wondering if there are some petroleum geologists here who might have some advice.

[rockdoc123]

By all means take the fluid mechanics courses....hydrology courses with a strong bent on fluid flow through porous media and the mathmatical expression of same would also be valuable. Back when I did my undergrad 35 or so years ago there would not have been much point in taking course like this....petroleum geology was still a field that was more to do with sedimentology, structural geology and organic geochemistry....but as we end up finding most of the easy fields better understanding of how oil gets from source rocks to the reservoir and how secondary or tertiary migration occurs will be a big aid in exploration. For the development geologist trying to get that extra 10% of recovery is going to require a good knowledge of how fluids behave in the subsurface. I had a school mate with did his PhD dissertation in hydrogeology and he is now consulting to the oil industry....basically developing fluid flow models for oil in the subsurface.

[fossil_fuel]

thanks for the info! i'll sign up for the fluid mechanics and hydrology courses.