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.
Wow, that's a tough one because there are a lot of things I enjoy about my job. I guess the thing that frustrates me the most is when illogical decisions are made in the non-technical areas of my job. For example, when we are faced with a challenging technical problem, we can usually all agree on the solution. When it's a non-technical issue, like how should we divide up the work among our team members or which team should win the award for best safety performance, we struggle to apply the same disciplined logic that we use for 95% of the rest of our work.
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There is a time lag of 2 to 4 years between a drop in the demand for petroleum engineers and an over-supply. Even if the price rebounds, overnight, it will still take at least 2 years to get caught up again. A reservoir engineer's skills in analyzing economics and running computer simulations should be transferable to many other entry level engineering jobs.
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Sorry but not my area of expertise.
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See my previous post just above. Prospects for Petroleum engineers are dismal right now. It will change but nobody can predict when. Stick with civil engineering .
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I think it really depends on what area of petroleum engineering you go into. When I was a young drilling engineer, I spent about 25% of my time on the drilling rigs, usually for 7 to 10 days at a time. When I became a reservoir engineer, I rarely went to the field and I had a very "9 to 5" job. I have some colleagues who choose to work overseas on a rotation of 28 days on (working 12 hours / day) and then 28 days off. When they are on days off, they are really off - no phone calls, no meetings and they really enjoy it. It's not, however, a great lifestyle if you have young kids. Later in my career, I am doing mostly safety and environmental work. I am gone about 10 to 15% of the time. Enough so that I don't get bored being in the office but not so much that I feel like I'm missing a lot of time with my family.
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Yes
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A lot has been written about the concept of "peak oil". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil. It was predicted by M King Hubbert in 1956 that oil production in the USA would peak in 1970. The problem with the theory is that it didn't foresee the invention of horizontal drilling and fracking. There are literally, billions of barrels of oil available in the Canadian oil sands as well as in the heavy oil fields of Venezuela. The limiting factor is the price of crude oil. When the price of crude is high enough, these fields are economical to produce. At current prices (May 2016), they are not. I don't think we will probably ever "run out" of petroleum because we will invent more technologies to extract it. The issue is whether those technologies will be economic and too carbon intensive to be advisable given the climate change impacts. A lot of energy goes INTO the process of extracting heavy oil, so the carbon footprint is rather large. We are also inventing ways to make transportation more efficient, so that we can squeeze more miles out of each gallon. What we haven't found a good replacement for is something from which to make plastics and pharmaceuticals. If I was in charge, I would use nuclear power and natural gas to generate electricity to run our ground transportation systems. I personally think that we can safely manage nuclear waste so long as it well regulated and not privatized. I would reserve liquid petroleum for use in aviation fuel and feedstock for plastics and pharmaceuticals. I would encourage solar and wind power wherever possible and encourage more research into wave power.
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