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 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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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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Just use a search engine and type in your question. I can't give you a specific website.
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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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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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Ok. Fair point. I don't really know enough about Trump's or Biden's policies to comment in detail. I'm not even sure Trump HAS an environmental policy except to roll back regulations and dismantle the EPA. He certainly does not seem anxious to give OSHA or MSHA (Mining) the kind of funding they need to do their jobs. Biden is likely to be more liberal on this but to get corporate support, he may not be very vocal about this. I think the election will focus on issues related to the pandemic and BLM.
Having worked for a large, integrated oil company, you might be surprised to learn that I personally support stringent environmental and safety regulations and support funding our regulatory agencies to conduct thorough and frequent inspections. Most large companies have internal policies that often exceed regulatory standards, so it is actually a competitive advantage for them to support rigorous regulations. However, many do not take that position, at least in public. The position often was, "Leave us alone. We can regulate ourselves". While some of the big companies CAN do this, the ones that don't make it bad for everyone - the public, their competitors, the environment and their employees. While I support stringent safety & environmental regulations, I also think we should give industry a bit of flexibility on how to achieve the end results, so long as it is done ethically and responsibly. I'm proud to say I did work on several regulations where we convinced regulators that there were more economic ways to achieve the same pollution or safety standard.
When it comes to energy policy (e.g. - the price of oil and gas, sanctions, etc.), we have to face the facts that it is a stacked deck. Saudi and OPEC still control a fair amount of the world's cheap oil. That won't last forever, but we are stuck with it for likely the next 10 to 20 years, at least. Unless we are willing to start a war (and sadly, this has happened before), we will continue to be dominated by OPEC and Russia.
I do support more sustainable energy solutions and I think engineers will continue to innovate and create cost effective solutions. That said, I think the market is mainly for home use and some industrial electricity needs. I don't see wind or solar replacing transportation fuels for a long, long time. It is just very hard to replace something like jet fuel in terms of BTUs/gallon. So, I think fossil fuels will have a place in our world for a long time to come.
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Absolutely! You need to read up on the Deepwater Horizon tragedy that occurred in the US Gulf of Mexico in 2010. 15 souls lost their lives due to mistakes made by the drilling engineers, the rig superintendents and management, in my opinion. I have read the studies and it is clear to me that the people responsible did not follow standard operating procedure. Things that I learned within the first few days on the job when I started in 1981. There are MANY more cases of blowouts (aka well control incidents) that cost people their lives.
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