Job: Geothermal Production Engineer – Calpine at the Geysers, California

The cooling tower for the West Ford Flat power plant, Geysers/ California (source: commons/ wikimedia, Rtracey)

Alexander Richter 18 Oct 2019

Calpine in California has announced an open position for a Geothermal Production Engineer at its geothermal operations in Middletown, California at the Geysers in Calpine’s Geothermal Production Analysis group.

The group develops views of production trends for the world’s largest operating geothermal field, The Geysers in Northern California. Relying heavily on input from the broader Geysers operations team, the production analysis group builds models to project output from the existing field, analyze the impacts of long-term capital investment options, and optimize near-term production decisions.
The Production Engineer will work as part of the Geothermal Production Analysis team in analyzing production and injection data, developing data-management improvement recommendations, conducting reservoir and steam gathering system performance evaluations for optimum field development. The ideal candidate will have had experience in data-driven analytics for reservoir and production optimization. We are particularly interested in individuals who have experience translating the outputs of analytical tools into field operations.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities will include some or all of the following:

• Provide support to the field reservoir engineers and recommendations to help maximize production and profitability of the facilities.
• Propose capital projects for annual budget planning and prepare economic justifications for capital projects and expense modifications.
• Collaborate with members of the Resource Team to plan medium and long-term reservoir management strategies, such as optimizing distribution of injected water and production drilling and re-drilling opportunities.
• Ensure project design changes and modifications are in compliance and able to meet schedule commitments and budget requirements.
• Maintain comprehensive up to date knowledge of reservoir data and technology.
• Analyze performance of production and injection wells, diagnose problems, propose improvements, plan remedial action, and assist with execution of the work.
• Assist in the evaluation, effects of any corrective action or change in field operations considering power generation, revenue and long-term resource performance.
• Proposed adjustments of operating conditions as necessary to maintain or improve throughput.
• Analyze process data to recommend operational changes to improve quality, reliability and efficiency (wells and steam gathering system).
• Responsible for daily process monitoring.
• Develop recommendations for mechanical changes to improve production.
• Implement strategies for monitoring well production and injection to assess performance and health on well-by-well basis.
• Evaluate inflow and outflow performance between the reservoir and the wellbore through testing and surveys.
• Evaluate injection infrastructure performance.
• Maintain the quality and completeness of geothermal resource database and operating records.

Requirements – Qualifications and Experience

• A bachelor or graduate degree in geology, gas/oil/geothermal reservoir engineering or computational/data science from an accredited university is required.
• Analytical/technical skills with a practical approach to problem solving.
• Familiar with data-management systems (e.g. SQL, SQLite or Microsoft SQL server, Microsoft Access, geodatabases etc)
• Familiar with geological and reservoir engineering modeling tools (e.g. GOCAD/SKUA, Petrel, Eclipse, VIP, Tetrad, STAR, TOUGH2, etc)
• Experience with programming languages (e.g. Fortran, C\C++, Python, R, etc)
• Comfortable operating in a data-intense environment.

Apply Online here.

Source: Calpine