So I’m currently a junior in high school and was wondering if I can get a job in petroleum engineering (drilling) 6 years later. Are there going to be jobs? Is it going to be hard to find them? Or do companies like chevron and shell recruit you right when you finish as a bachelor?
Thanks!!
Are you majoring in PE, because of the salary?
25% yes and 75% I want to work on the fields. I watched some videos on YouTube about their lifestyle and how they work and I really liked it. You work 2 weeks in a harsh and stressful environment then 2 weeks you get to spend enjoying (something like that). I really like that schedule. Plus there’s a lot of other majors that you just sit in a office that pay close to a PE, but I want a job that I can enjoy, explore and do different stuff not just sit in a office. So can you answer my question please?
No one knows what oil prices and the global economy will look like 6 years from now.
Who knows, if we do we"ll be rich for sure. I mean making bet on the oil market to profit from this.
Have you thought about become an emergency doctor? I think they get time off after a few weeks of work.
I’ve heard this from some of my family members who are doctors.
I don’t know of any jobs that let junior engineers work two weeks on, and two weeks off, because you cant have possibly learned everything about the company while you were in school.
It is called “paying dues”. You get the grunt work. You come in early and stay late. You say yes to extra work. You dress professionally unless the task calls for something else. And, most importantly, you stay off of the Internet on company time.
If you show any laziness, your performance review, work locale, and raises, will reflect your job performance.
Aunt bea, I respectfully disagree. My closest friend works as a petroleum engineer, and there are quite a few jobs for relatively junior people that are two weeks on, two weeks off. I’ll use Shell as an example, since that’s where the friend works. When you first start, you are in training for quite a while, and you are responsible for small pieces of projects/wells, reporting to someone more senior. With that said, you are not expected to come in early and stay late - junior engineers work 9/80s, which means you put in 80 hours of work over 9 days, giving you a day off every other week.
Once you are certified and ready to go, you have options. Some people prefer to work at HQ, which still allows for the 9/80 schedule (though you will often work far more than 80 hours in those nine days). Others prefer to work at well sites. Of those others, some will be working at land based wells, which usually means relocating to wherever is convenient to get to the well sites. Still others will work on rigs, which is what the OP is talking about.
Those working on rigs do work two weeks on, two weeks off. For the first few years, you will be expected to live within 60 or so miles of the helipad used to transport you to your well (though it is rare that this requirement will be enforced). After you reach a certain level in the company and have certain educational credentials (through in house training programs), you are given more freedom - you will likely have responsibility for more wells, but as a result, your location is basically irrelevant, so you can live anywhere and will get flown to the appropriate location for your time on site.
Now, regarding whether there will be jobs, put it this way: if what they said in 1975 was right, we would have run out of oil more than a decade ago; today, the accepted belief is that we have not yet discovered even half of the oil out there. There will be jobs. How many, however, depends heavily on OPEC. Here’s a VERY brief (and probably inaccurate) account of where we are and how we got there.
For decades, OPEC was a powerful cartel that dictated the price of oil. If they wanted to raise prices, they would simply reduce production, and if they wanted to lower prices, they would increase production. Oil prices were a great way to learn about supply and demand (though because of the cartel aspect, supply was artificial, since in a free market the supply would increase until equilibrium is hit, giving the “ideal” price for both consumers and companies, whereas in a cartel environment, the chips are stacked in the companies’ favor). In the 2000s, researchers discovered MASSIVE quantities of oil throughout the continental United States in the form of shale, quickly catapulting us to the top tier of oil rich countries.
Extracting this oil, however, required hydroulic fracturing (fracking) and was typically prohibitavely expensive, so companies spent billions in R&D, trying to discover cheaper ways to go about the process. Closer to 2008, companies began to discover reasonably inexpensive ways to extract the oil, and the fracking boom began, first in the Bakken fields in North Dakota, then in the Marcellus fields throughout the Appalachians, and soon throughout much of the continental United States. Even though shale energy has become cheap enough to extract, it is still far more expensive than traditional means of extracting oil. OPEC is well aware of this.
By 2014, OPEC could no longer exert its force as a cartel by reducing supply - the United States was already the world’s largest producer of natural gas and the third largest produce of oil, behind only Saudi Arabia and Russia. In the past, a reduction in production by OPEC meant that world oil supply was significantly lower; now, a reduction by OPEC can be met easily by increased production in the United States, so prices will not rise.
In late 2014, OPEC decided to risk its own profits by flooding the market with oil. Prices fell from a consistent $90-$100/bbl to below $50/bbl, which is why we started to see gas prices drop last fall and why they remain substantially lower today than they were last year. OPEC believed that the reduction in price would cause US frackers to lose profitability: if it costs, say, $30 to produce one barrel of traditional crude and $50 to produce one barrel of shale, then at $45/bbl the traditional crude is still profitable but the shale is losing money. The thought, therefore, was that US oil manufacturers would only keep their wells operating at a loss for a limited time, and eventually they would be forced to abandon the wells.
To a certain extent, OPEC was right. In the spring of 2015, the US came dangerously close to exceeding the capacity of its storage facilities, which, combined with the drop in prices, caused oil companies to abandon a handful of its less productive wells. At the same time, with the price of oil lower, companies had to tighten their belts and cut costs throughout their organizations, but to the best of my knowledge, they have not slowed hiring or had any layoffs - this dip in prices is only temporary, as eventually supply will decline AND R&D will come up with cheaper ways to frack.
This answer was the greatest!!! Thank you very much chrisw.