<p>I'm pretty interested in Petroleum these days.
but my chemistry is terrible,I can't understand it at all.</p>
<p>Most people who go into the petroleum industry come from chemical engineering backgrounds and I'm afraid that if you really dislike chemistry, consider a different career path, cuz chemistry is all your gonna get in school.</p>
<p>There are two major engineering issues with petroleum. The first issue is to get it out of the ground. The second issue, after it's out of the ground, is to refine it into useful products.</p>
<p>The second issue falls into the general category of "chemical engineering". Not surprisingly, it does tend to involve a lot of chemistry.</p>
<p>But the first issue, which falls into the general category of "petroleum engineering", typically does not involve chemistry to the same extent. For example, look at this undergraduate PetE</a> curriculum from Texas Tech. There is one semester of intro chem and one semester of thermodynamics, but these are the only chemistry or ChemE requirements. And it wouldn't surprise me if these two courses were general requirements for all of their engineering degrees. </p>
<p>The PetE courses cover things like drilling engineering, the properties of reservoir rocks and fluids, and oil recovery. There are more geology requirements than chemistry requirements.</p>
<p>Bottom line: if you want to refine petroleum, you will need to learn a lot of chemistry. If you want to recover petroleum, you won't.</p>
<p>Yeah, not happening.</p>
<p>That's like saying you want to be a math major but can't wrap your head around addition.</p>
<p>Well you could be really good at subtraction and subtract negative :/</p>
<p>Oh god diatomic molecules OH GOD</p>
<p>I think people overstate the amount of chemical knowledge required for PetE.</p>
<p>If you dont want to go into the chemistry side of the petrolium industry then I would major in something like geophysics. Although I'm not sure going into that industry right now is the smartest idea 20 years from now. Especially if you dont have a chem E degree to fall back on if you cant find work in oil recovery. I may be wrong and there are probably a lot more people with better information than I have but that is just what i think.</p>