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 am not sure what your question ism but I do feel compelled to give you some advice. Prior to investing the time and money in a Petroleum Engineering degree, I suggest you educate yourself on the price of oil and gas. It has collapsed to by 60% from June 2014 (>$100/bbl) to Nov 2015 (~$40/bbl). It is not going to recover any time soon and there have been massive layoffs in the US oil and gas industry. Now is not a good time to be looking for a job as a petroleum engineer. There is a steady demand for civil engineers to basic municipal work (road construction, bridge repair, wastewater treatment, water delivery systems). The pay is not at the top end of the scale, but steady work is better than no work.
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Persons with many different degrees work as petroleum engineers. It all depends on supply and demand. Unfortunately, as of July 2015, there are more petroleum engineering graduates than there are jobs. When supply is low and demand is high (translation: crude oil prices are high), major integrated oil companies hire good engineering graduates with a wide variety of backgrounds and train them to be petroleum engineers. Typically, they pay the market rate for starting salaries in that particular discipline (i.e. - the starting salary for a chemical engineer in and oil company won't typically be much higher than the starting salary in other industries). However, over time the salaries for all engineers will be based on merit and not on degree.
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Sorry but I would need to know more info to answer your question and the purpose of this site is more about daily work life, not assisting students with exam questions
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I can't really make a prediction on that. Nobody knows what oil prices will be like.
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Sorry, but I do not understand your question.
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I think you may have been confusing things you have heard about people who work in the petroleum industry with petroleum engineers. Many of the folks who work on drilling rigs do work a grueling schedule. Some shifts are 28 days on and 28 days off. During the days on, people work 12 hours a day. Many of those folks are NOT petroleum engineers. I will admit that I have occasionally had to put in a 16 hour day during a critical time on a project but it's fairly unusual. The most important thing you need to consider about petroleum engineering is whether you will be able to get a job. The price of oil has been at one of it's lowest rates in a long time and many petroleum engineering graduates are not able to find a job. The industry will be rebound, but I would not want to gamble my college education on that. Instead, I strongly encourage you to pursue a more broad engineering degree, such as Mechanical, Chemical or Civil. When the industry rebounds, companies that hire petroleum engineers will also be hiring these other degrees and provide the on the job training needed. However, Petroleum engineering is so specialized that these graduates are often NOT able to find a job with all the other companies that hire Mechanical, Chemical & Civil - companies like Ford, GM, Caterpillar, utility companies, construction companies, etc. Pretty much ANY company you go to work for is still going to have to give you on the job training but most of them prefer you to have a general degree like chemical, mechanical, etc. The wonderful thing about an engineering curriculum is that if you have good grades, you will be able to get several summer internships to try out some of these different industries before you graduate. Best of luck to you!
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Sorry, but I don't answer technical questions like that. The focus of this site is on what it's like to work in my profession.
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