Oil Production
The high price of oil has renewed exploration activity, but energy engineering and geoscience professionals in the United States are rapidly moving toward retirement age. Political and technological changes may rapidly accelerate the number of trained professionals needed. Whether prices will hold at current levels is subject to debate, but even at half the current prices demand for new resources will stay strong, and recruitment practices for all oil jobs domestically and internationally will have to adapt.
Ian Jack retired from British Petroleum in 2002 after thirty years of seeking oil for BP, and at the beginning of his career with Texas Instruments. He tells CareerBuilder that the world has never needed his experience and expertise more than today, so his retired days are filled with global consulting and teaching. High oil prices translate into increased exploration and increased employment.
Mr. Jack says that one of the main challenges for oil companies is to replace retirees who are more insistent upon actual retirement than he is. Saying that the average age of oil industry professionals is 50, and that 73% of them are past 40, he refers to these as "scary numbers." When oil prices crashed in the 1980s, the demand for oil exploration crashed with it. Academic departments in United States universities that developed earlier generations of chemical engineers and geophysical scientists saw enrollments fade. In this decade, says Ian Jack, exploration is up by a factor of two to three times, and universities have been slow to react.
Earlier this year, Professor Andrew Gellman of the Chemical Engineering Department at Carnegie-Mellon University told CareerBuilder that the decline in oil exploration during the 80s and 90s coincided with significant growth in the kinds of careers available to chemical engineers.
"20 or 30 years ago most chemical engineers had two basic choices. They worked in the chemical industry for companies like Dow or DuPont, or they worked in the petroleum industry for oil companies. Today the choices are much broader, and involve fields as diverse as food, bio-medical, and semiconductors."
In part, the boom in oil exploration is related to growing demand in developing nations like China and India, but an even greater contributor factor to oil exploration is the relationship between cost and price. The "lifting" cost of finding, pumping, and refining oil remains in a range of $15 to $30 per barrel. The steady rise in oil prices from a decade low of under $20 per barrel just after September, 2001, to its current price in the mid $120s explains much about oil company profitability.
The strong motivation to spend money on exploration will mean extraordinary employment opportunities in oil and gas exploration. Where will these opportunities come from? Here are some ideas.
Politics
Political change in the United States in this election year is likely to change foreign policy in significant ways, and that means a new approach to energy partnerships. One of the most attractive partnerships is with Mexico, where the government's energy policy is in even greater disarray than it is in the United States.
Oil production in Mexico is plummeting, which is a serious issue inasmuch as Mexico is the world's sixth largest oil producer and accounts for 11% of U.S. oil. A year over year decline from 3.18 million barrels to 2.85 million barrels per day in the month of March, 2008, has Mexican President Felipe Calderón pushing for reform in the status of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex,) the state-owned oil company. The Mexican constitution expressly forbids selling or sharing oil assets or profits, but Pemex lacks the expertise that United States oil companies could easily provide to find new fields or make more of existing fields.
While U.S. companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton supply contract field services, larger oil entities are not likely to assist in exploration without receiving a piece of the action. This is a thorny political and cultural issue in Mexico, and further action – or inaction – from Mexico's Congress is due in the second half of 2008. Another country with huge untapped oil resources is Cuba, which is currently befriended by China.
Technology
New technologies are allowing United States companies like Denbury Resources to reopen oil fields that were once thought depleted. Ian Jack says that old technologies allowed drillers to recover only 40% of the oil in a field before the result was no longer worth the cost and effort. Surprisingly, Denbury's new initiative involves the use of CO2 buried in the earth to revive depleted oil fields via a technology that has been around for years but has only made sense with the higher oil prices of this decade. Denbury pulls CO2 out of the earth in the southeastern U.S., liquefies it, and transports it via pipeline to southern oil fields to be injected into porous rock where oil lies trapped. CO2 acts as a solvent to release the oil from the rock. This process has proven highly profitable. The extracted oil is of the highest quality, and Denbury claims to have enough projects and reserves of CO2 and oil to maintain output growth for another six years.
Employment is abundant in large scale processes like this one, and calls for a wide number of technical disciplines in engineering and geosciences, not to mention governmental compliance positions. CO2 is also one of the main pollutants contributing to global warming, and if companies can learn to capture CO2 from industrial processes it can be used to harvest oil rather than be returned to the atmosphere. Larger oil companies merged, bought back shares, and sold assets while oil prices were low. Even as prices have increased, their exploration budgets have until now remained at roughly the same percentage of revenue. Most significant growth in hiring is happening at smaller, more nimble companies, and the U.S. Department of Labor forecasts much faster than average job growth (25%) for geoscientists through 2016.
What kind of article about oil and gas hiring fails to include the word roustabout? Blue collar employment is also on the rise in energy fields. Just as surging oil prices have created demand for pipeline and oil rig workers, the same types of employees are losing jobs in the airline and automobile industries because of the same higher prices. United and Continental and Ford and GM have all announced recent cutbacks at facilities in the industrial north, and most of the oil jobs are in the south, so a strong effort will be required to attract skilled and unskilled workers to pipelines and offshore rigs.
In the automobile industry there is unlikely to be a return to income levels previously enjoyed even if the industry does rebound. Oil rig workers of various kinds often begin at $50,000 annually, and cap out around $90,000. This compares favorably with auto and airline jobs, and is even on a par with oil jobs for new Ph.D.s in the geosciences. The work is difficult, and oil rig workers are often at their posts for two weeks at a time, but benefits and travel expenses are often generous, and two weeks on duty are balanced out with three weeks at home. In many cases the ability to reopen an offshore oil rig is dependent upon finding enough mechanics and roughnecks.
Finally, Ian Jack reports that hiring practices are changing in the larger world labor market to reflect local circumstances and the economic value of diversity.
Current Oil and Gas Jobs
Project Manager (Gas Processing)
Details: This opportunity is located in Denver, CO. We are offering relocation assistance to that area for this position. Job is at a senior project management level. Role is to be responsible for planning, organizing, and executing major fa
Project Manager (Gas Processing)
Please contact web-master
Oil and Gas Jobs RSS Feed