Oil Comp Engr
38 Years Experience
Houston, TX
Female, 60
I recently retired from a major integrated oil company after 38 years. I have degrees in Civil and Petroleum Engineering. I worked with safety, health and environmental management systems and operations in the upstream (finding and producing oil and gas) and downstream (refining, chemicals and distributions) areas. I travelled all over world, enduring good & bad business cycles and good and bad managers.
I don't think it's that weird at all. There is a lot of work that requires familiarity with both petroleum engineering and environmental engineering. In order to get a permit to drill, for example, it is often necessary to conduct an environmental impact assessment. Someone with expertise in both areas can bring a lot of value to the process. When I was getting my Master's degree, there were folks with a wide variety of backgrounds in my program. Keep in mind, however, that I pursued that degree a few cycles ago. Right now, with the collapse in oil prices, I wouldn't recommend to anyone to pursue an advanced degree in petroleum engineering. There are massive layoffs at the service companies. Things will turn around eventually, but there's no way to predict when that will happen.
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As a Petroleum Engineer, if you focus on reservoir engineering and well log analysis, there is really no reason for you to travel to the field other than a few trips to get oriented early on. The other extreme is drilling engineering where you could be in the field a lot, depending on your company.
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Your question is very broad. When you say "hire-able", it would depend on what you want to do. Many of the oil company research labs do employ folks with a PhD in physics. So, if you want to do research, then a PhD in physics would make you employable, depending on what you have specialized in within the field of physics and what the companies need right now. You would probably not be employable in today's current climate as an engineer because you might need too much training. When the price of oil is high and the supply of engineers was low, I have seen companies hire folks with technical degrees (applied math, physics) and train them to do the engineering work. Unfortunately, the price of oil is relatively low (it has collapsed 50% since June 2014) and the supply of engineers is high. As to your question on salary, it will increase in relation to the supply and demand situation as well as inflation. Petroleum engineers are typically among the highest paid engineering disciplines. You can find more information on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Please keep in mind that my area of expertise is USA based. Things can be quite different in other countries.
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It will depend on the particular university you plan to attend. However many of your undergraduate classes like physics, statics, dynamics, calculus will be similar to what the petroleum undergraduates will have had. One thing they will have had that you will need is some geology courses. You should be able to catch up pretty quick, though.
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When I started out, I spent about 25% of my time at the rig or out in the field. Currently, I'm gone about 10% of the time. I have had some jobs where I worked a regular 9 to 5 day in the office for months and months on end, so had a lot of time with my family. It really depends on the business cycle and what area of the business you specialize in. When I was a reservoir engineer, I almost never travelled. As a drilling engineer, expect to travel quite a bit more.
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That's a somewhat subjective question, but if you want to measure it on a basis of the total carbon footprint, then clearly oil sands production creates the largest carbon footprint. To extract oil from oil sands requires a very large amount of energy to separate the petroleum from the reservoir rock. That energy is typically generated by burning fossil fuel (either oil or natural gas). The ratio of energy obtained for every unit of energy input is referred to as the Energy Returned on Investment (EROI). For conventional oil production, the ratio is about 25 to 1. For oil sands mining, it is about 5 to 1. This is why oil sands mining is only economical when the price of oil is relatively high. So, from the standpoint of carbon footprint, I would consider it the worst. In terms of net impact to the environment, with proper regulation and oversight, industry can and has been able to responsibly extract petroleum and return the environment to a suitable state in a relatively reasonable period of time. So, I can't really rate all other methods as to which is "best". It is highly dependent on local conditions, local regulations and the integrity and internal standards of the company doing the work.
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The biggest advantage that a Petroleum Engineer has when it comes to internships is with independent oil and gas companies. They typically do not have as much in-house training as the integrated oil and gas companies do. At the integrated oil and gas companies, they are accustomed to providing training to graduates with degrees in mechanical, chemical etc. In today's economy, I advise students (in the USA, anyway) to shy away from Petroleum Engineering so that they have more options when they graduate.
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