Many friends and colleagues have assisted me at various stages in the production of this textbook. In particular, I would like to express sincere gratitude and appreciation to the following people for their special efforts: Dr. Victoria Price, Director of ESL at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas, USA, for offering many valuable suggestions, help and kindly support; Mr.Horace Davidson, Beaumont, Texas,USA, for his assistance in the recording of the audio cassette; Prof. Oleg Tarnopolsky for his reviewing the textbook and some insightful suggestions; Prof. Yaroslav Kotskulych for his helpful advice on the technical content of the textbook; Dr.Arsen Smaglyuk and Vitaly Panchuk for their technical assistance in computer design and in creating a book out of a manuscript; my colleagues, teachers of Ivano-Frankivsk State Teclinical University of Oil and Gas for piloting much of the material and providing useful feedback; and of course my students of Oil and Gas Faculty with whose inspirational involvement the textbook was tested.
I am very grateful to the Council for International Exchange of Scholars and William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board for that lucky opprtunity to be selected as a Fulbright grantee, to work at Lamar University library and look through its invaluable treasure - books and magazines related to oil and gas industry. The textbook reading materials and illustrations borrowed from the authentic sources will be of great help for the students majoring in petroleum engineering in Ukraine.
