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 an economist, BUT this is an unprecedented crisis with the combination of Covid19 + the OPEC disagreements. We will need oil and gas for the foreseeable future, but the competition for volume will continue to be fierce, in my opinion, driving prices down for the long term. I'm not sure if the industry will "thrive" again for a very long time. There is a lot of talk about layoffs at the major oil companies. I predict that many of the small independent oil companies will either declare bankruptcy or be bought up by the majors at deeply discounted prices. If you are pursuing a graduate degree in Petroleum Engineering, I would IMMEDIATELY change course to a degree that is more broad, such as Mechanical or Chemical. The demand for someone with an undergraduate PE degree is going to be low to non-existent and, for a graduate degree, even worse. If you have read my previous postings, you will see that I am NOT a fan of getting a PE degree. It is just too narrow. I was very lucky to start in the oil business in 1981 with peak demand. Somehow, I survived 38 years of ups and downs, but likely it was because I was very flexible and willing to move into other departments, such as Safety & Environmental and in other business lines, such as Refining. Unfortunately, very few companies that are not in the oil industry will be interested in hiring someone with e degree in Petroleum. It is just too narrow.Best of luck to you.
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I am retired BUT my job would most certainly be affected by COVID-19. In my most recent position, I oversaw the safety, health and environmental audits that were conducted by a team of people from peer sites. That is not an essential activity, so I'm certain those audits were put on pause, much as we did after Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast a few years ago. Transportation of all forms, auto, rail and air, is down significantly due to COVID-19, so this has a negative ripple effect all the way back up the supply chain to the drilling rigs that drill for oil. In addition, I'm not so sure I would even want to be working on an oil rig right now, with everyone living and working in close quarters. So, in an odd way, the oil price collapse which is causing rigs to shut down, might be helping to keep people healthy, though unemployed.
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Sorry, but I answer only questions about what it is like to work in the industry. I don't answer questions about technical issues.
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I think it could work if the proper incentives were put in place, such as a carbon tax and if there is proper regulatory oversight. We are going to need things like jet fuel from hydrocarbons for a long time to come but solar, wind and nuclear can certainly be used to generate electricity for homes, some businesses and vehicles with the proper incentives in place. It is going to take a much more progressive congress, however than we currently have AND some careful planning on how we will deal with the inevitable reaction by the Middle East and Russia to keep oil prices low. We will need the political will to absorb a much higher tax burden, in my opiniion.
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I STRONGLY encourage you to diversify. Have you looked at the job market lately? Many companies are not only NOT hiring, but are actively laying people off. Unless you are looking at working for a nationalized oil company and/or are located in the Mid East, things are very, very tough right now. The beautiful thing about the petroleum industry is that there is a wide diversity of backgrounds. Things that you learn in Chemical engineering can be applied to the petroleum industry. Also, keep in mind that the purpose of any engineering degree is to learn how to learn, so to speak. It is all about getting more tools in your toolkit and learning to solve a wide variety of problems. With any master's degree, you are going to demonstrate that you can tackle a tough problem in detail over an extended period of time. I have worked with many engineers who didn't use the specific thing they learned in their master's thesis but they DID use the skills they developed in how to frame a complex problem, set up the research, write the thesis and then, most importantly, defend their ideas.
By getting a masters in Chem E, you will broaden your chances of getting a job upon graduation. You can always come back to the upstream when the economy recovers.
Best of luck to you.
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Just use a search engine and type in your question. I can't give you a specific website.
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I'm not an economist, but based on previous cycles I have lived through, I would guess 3 to 5 years for just a partial recovery. It depends a LOT on: 1) If/when we get an effective vaccine for corona virus that provides life long protection. 2). How long it takes to immunize a substantial portion of the planet. 3) When the virus mutates and re-emerges as a different form (hopefully that won't happen in our lifetime but it is bound to happen at some point - study the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. The other factor to throw in the mix is the geopolitical instability in the midEast and Russia. The price collapse was all about Russia trying to respond the booming US oil shale situation. So long as Putin is in power in Russia, we are going to be under severe price pressure.
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