Oil and Gas Systems Engineering: Principles and Practice from Discovery to Decommissioning

Oil and gas developments are among the most complex engineered systems built anywhere, yet many of them fail to deliver what was promised. Experience across the industry shows that these failures rarely stem from a lack of technical expertise in individual disciplines. They arise instead from immature requirements, unmanaged interfaces, decisions taken without regard to the full lifecycle, and the difficulty of integrating the work of many specialists, contractors and partners into a coherent whole. This book was written to address that gap. It sets out how the principles and methods of systems engineering, developed in aerospace and defence and codified in standards such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288, can be applied to the realities of oil and gas: uncertain reservoirs, one-off facilities, long asset lives, major accident hazards and an industry now navigating the energy transition.

The book follows the lifecycle of an asset. Part I establishes the foundations of systems thinking, the stage-gate process and front-end loading. Part II provides the petroleum and value chain knowledge that a systems engineer needs. Part III covers requirements, concept selection, architecture and interface management, the core of systems engineering practice. Part IV applies these methods to the main elements of the production system, from integrated modelling and subsea systems to processing, flow assurance, pipelines, utilities and control. Part V treats safety, reliability, integrity and environmental performance as system properties. Part VI follows the asset through commissioning, operations and decommissioning, and Part VII looks ahead to the energy transition before drawing every thread together in an integrated case study of a fictional field from discovery to decommissioning. Each chapter includes learning objectives, worked examples, case studies, practitioner perspectives, review questions and references, and is illustrated throughout to make the concepts concrete.

The book is intended for senior undergraduate and graduate students in petroleum, chemical, mechanical and systems engineering, for discipline engineers moving into integration and leadership roles, and for project, operations and asset managers who want a structured view of how their decisions shape outcomes across decades. It can be read from beginning to end or used selectively, following the reading paths suggested in Chapter 1. Throughout, the aim has been to combine rigour with practicality: to explain not only what the methods are, but when they matter, how they are applied on real projects, and where their limitations lie. If readers come away asking, earlier and more persistently, what a system is for, who it serves, where its interfaces lie and how its success will be verified, the book will have achieved its purpose.