After World War II, petroleum engineers continued to refine the techniques of reservoir analysis and petrophysics. In 1947 the first commercial well at sea that was out of sight of land was completed in the Gulf of Mexico by the Kerr-McGee oil company. Other developers in the Gulf of Mexico quickly followed suit, and “offshore” petroleum engineering became a topic of study and part of petroleum production. The outstanding event of the 1950s was development of the offshore oil industry and a whole new technology. Since onshore petroleum engineers had little knowledge of wave heights and wave forces, other engineering disciplines provided expertise, including oceanographers and marine engineers recently discharged from the armed forces. Soon design standards were developed, and more complex infrastructure was built to drill and develop offshore. Shallow-water drilling barges evolved into mobile platforms, then into jack-up barges, and finally into semisubmersible and floating drilling ships.

A number of major developments in the petroleum industry occurred during the 1960s. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was formed in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1960. Many of the known supergiant oil fields were discovered. Computers were employed by engineers to help analyze subsurface readings from logs including Schlumberger’s first dipmeter logs digitized on magnetic tape.

By the 1970s digital seismology had been introduced, resulting from advances made in computing and recording in the 1960s. Digital seismology allowed geoscientists working with petroleum engineers to gain a greater understanding of the size and nature of the total reservoir beyond what could be detected through wireline logging. Seismic waves were generated by setting off dynamite, which has since been replaced with vibroseis (a vibrating mechanism that creates seismic waves by striking Earth’s surface) and air-gun arrays and recording the sound waves as they travel to a detector some distance away. The analysis of the different arrival times and amplitudes of the waves allowed geoscientists and engineers to identify rock that may contain productive oil and gas. In 1975 oil and gas companies and academia began comparing their findings and exchanging reports through ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. The combination of this communication tool with an already global industry produced an explosion of new technologies and practices, such as virtual collaborations, just-in-time technology decisioning, and drilling at greater depths.

Between the 1980s and the end of the 20th century, the steady growth of petroleum engineering was halted by an oil glut that depressed oil prices. This event led to an industry downturn, restructurings of companies, and industry-wide mergers and acquisitions. A generation of potential petroleum engineers selected alternate careers. However, those who continued to work in the field developed much of the equipment capable of exploring and extracting petroleum from the new frontiers of deepwater and ultra-deepwater environments—depths greater than about 305 metres (1,000 feet) and 1,524 metres (5,000 feet), respectively. In 2000 Exxon Mobil and BP launched a platform known as Hoover-Diana in 1,463 metres (4,800 feet) of water in the Gulf of Mexico to recover petroleum from these environments. By 2014 the Shell Oil Company had placed its own floating platform, the Perdido, in the Gulf of Mexico in 2,450 metres (8,000 feet), and it became the world’s deepest floating oil platform.

In the early 21st century, petroleum engineers developed strategies to exploit massive unconventional resource plays such as shale oil, heavy oils, and tar sands. Integrated teams of geoscientists, economists, surface engineers, and environmental engineers worked to capture these unconventional oils and gases in sand and shale. While public controversy remained about technologies such as hydraulic fracturing required to reach the shale plays, by 2010 the ranks of petroleum engineers in the United States had swelled to pre-1985 levels. Ultra-deepwater drilling and exploration expanded rapidly into the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, Russia, and West Africa, reaching water depths greater than 3,660 metres (about 12,000 feet) with an additional 3,350 metres (approximately 11,000 feet) in lateral drilling.