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 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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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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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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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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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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