In our quest to grasp various aspects of production operations as practiced in the oil field, we learned from others through personal interaction and through published work. Our colleagues, in both academia and the industry, have enriched our knowledge over the years. We are indebted to them all.

We would like to recognize a few who have made the real difference in our learning and the eventual compilation of the second edition of this book. Three noted practitioners reviewed three new chapters in this edition of the book. Specifically, we are indebted to Janvier Lissanon of BHP Billiton for reviewing Chapter 5, U. B. Sathuvalli of Blade Energy for scrutinizing Chapter 10, and Suri Suryanarayana, also of Blade Energy, for providing useful feedback on Chapter 7. We remain grateful to Cem Sarica of Tulsa University for reviewing the manuscript of the book’s first edition. We express our sincere gratitude to our respective organizations, the University of North Dakota, Texas A&M University, and Chevron and Hess, for aiding our pursuit. SPE book editor Jane Eden’s stewardship is much appreciated. We are immensely grateful to Harry Butler for doing a thorough painstaking job during the copy-editing phase of this project.

We are indebted to many graduate students who have made direct contributions to the book’s cause over the years. Most notably, Xiaowei Wang and Dongqing Lin at the University of North Dakota contributed a great deal in developing many models presented in several chapters. We acknowledge the contributions of Bulent Izgec of Texas A&M University and Chevron to modeling thermal effects influencing pressure gauge response and annular pressure buildup. More recently, two Texas A&M University graduate students gave invaluable help: Tony Rocha-Valadez contributed to the modeling of sustained casing pressure and integrity of gas lift valves, and Ruochen Liu helped develop blowout models for gas and oil wells. A current Texas A&M University student, Gibran Hashmi, assisted in developing models for rate estimation from temperature or pressure data. Many field examples were drawn from hands-on experience that one of us (C. S. Kabir) has had in fields across many basins.

Several academics helped shape our understanding of this technology through their exemplary leadership. Graham Wallis of Dartmouth College formalized the drift-flux approach for two-phase flow modeling. The late Abraham Dukler of the University of Houston and the late Hank Ramey Jr. of Stanford University laid the foundation for mechanistic modeling of two-phase flow and wellbore heat transfer, respectively. We were inspired by the body of work that James Brill of the University of Tulsa and Khalid Aziz of Stanford University had contributed to the field.

Last, our family members, especially our spouses, deserve particular mention for their encouragement and fortitude. Their extraordinary understanding allowed us to steal countless hours from family time so that we could complete this edition of the book. Finally, our parents taught us values that inspired us to compile this material. To this end, we hope the reader finds this text stimulating and useful.