<p>any petroleum engineers here who can tell me how it is?</p>
<p>Lucrative.</p>
<p>DP</p>
<p>but is the lifestyle worth the money?</p>
<p>You don't necessarily have to work on a rig.</p>
<p>For example, here in Canada, as far as I know, drilling/reservoir/production engineers work in Calgary. Calgary is no Toronto or Montreal, but it's a real city!</p>
<p>Reservoir/production engineers generally work in a city. Houston, Calgary, Aberdeen, Bakersfield, etc.</p>
<p>Drilling has a few different options. But many degreed Petroleum Engineers work on rigs as a supervisor/manager position.</p>
<p>what is the estimated salary straight out of college and the estimated salary if you get a master's degree?</p>
<p>[url=<a href="http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos027.htm%5DEngineers%5B/url">http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos027.htm]Engineers[/url</a>]</p>
<p>Avg. Starting Salaries straight outta college...
Bachelors: $60,718
Masters: $57,000 </p>
<p>These are nation-wide statistics, and obviously the region you live in will also affect your starting salary.</p>
<p>I have heard figures as high as 100k including bonuses. Of course, these fresh grads are working in undesirable locations. Those who work in cities or even downstream may still get 60-70k roughly.</p>
<p>thanks for the info guys, i really appreciate it. i was planning on double majoring in PE and business and maybe minor in geology or something. would this be too much of a workload? or should i just major in PE and minor in business?</p>
<p>I don't know if I would waste time doing the business minor. In the petroleum industry, most folks work early in their career and move into the management/business side of things anyways with or without the business minor. If you really want to gear your focus to the business side of things, get an MBA + your PE degree which will be highly lucrative (at least for the short term).</p>
<p>omg double major in petroleum AND business AND minor in something else...?@_@
i would say it's not worth the money...
what's good about petroleum engineering is that the gas companies are there to pay off you college bills, so I would choose petroleum engineering.
And you don't even have to work in the industry...there are many other job options for a petroleum engineer:D</p>
<p>Forget about the minor, I'm a petroleum engineering major at LSU. In engineering you really don't have time for minors. You already will take enough geology classes for the petroleum engineering degree itself, a minor in geology would be pretty useless to a petroleum engineer. I love geology, but a petroleum engineer is not a geologist. You'll be looking at wells and calculation the porosity of formations, and reading well longs, to all see if an area will be in the "Pay Zone". Now an MBA would be nice, although with what petroleum engineers are getting paid these days you really don't need the MBA, unless you would like to do consultant work, which for the oil companies pays like a mil a year. All of our graduates are getting in the top 80ish to top 90's, some even in the hundreds for starting pay. Sign on bonuses are nice, 25,000, 30,000 a pop. Working conditions bad, lol. Common misconception. Yeah your away from the family, but hell, some people like being away from their nagging wife, lol. In relatively 2-3 years you can be making 150,000 a year. My good friend's dad work for a an oil company. His dad is a supervisor for the entire gulf coast $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. He just hired a petroleum engieering who worked with for another company, 10 years work of experience, the guy he hired is 32 years old, 330,000 a year. OMG, plenty of opportunity, job is very stressful though, and you will have to put off having a family atleast until 30 or so. Usually you move up to a supervisor position. Alot of time will be spent staying up, 2 days at a time. Alot of traveling. Of course it all varies with companies or field choice, drillling engineers will make more than production, reservoir, will make more than production, but production is probably the easiest, you just chill, they have 22 year old's raking in 15,000 a month, lol. The rigs are like 5 star hotels offshore, you can get the cook to whip up just about anything. Alot of people stick to the steak and seafood. You will be able to meet alot of people from all over the place. You work alot, but get weeks off at a time, you sacrifice time to have time. Great thing about it, once you get off your shift, lets say 14, 21, or 28 days, you may get 2 weeks or so off, depends which company and job. All depends, would you like to make 65 in an office, or 350 drilling, humpf, so hard, yeah right, lol. you can keep that desk.</p>
<p>its well logs, not longs, lol, its late, sign that I need to go to bed. Also, the calculations aren't that bad, if your good at math. Necessary, of course all engineers should love math, if not, what the hell are they doing in engineering. yeah just excuse all of those grammar errors, lol.</p>
<p>thanks for the reply Forever LSU, the life seems just for me :)</p>
<p>Hey no problem. If you ever want to know anything about it I'll do my best to answer it. Are you in college right now, or are you still in high school? If you are still in high school I would recommend taking all the courses possible. Physics, all the maths offered, chemistrys, earth sciences, evironmental sciences, computer science if you need a fill in. But petroleum engineers don't mess with that, would be nice just to know, lol. I really like it though. Most of my professors only worked around 20 years and retired, lol. I love all the sciences man, If I wasn't doing petroleum engineering, I would probably do physics or something along those lines. Everything just fascinates me. Especially theoretical physics. The study of the black hole. Did you know this is not the only universe, lol, they have multiple universes. Pretty sick stuff. Hell, what will really be cool. Is NASA and the government have plans to set up the lunar colony, and excavate the hydrocarbons on Jupiter's moon Titan. Now that would be something awesome to do. I don't know if it would happen in our lifetime, but if technology does advance fast enough, I'll gladly take 9 months out of my life to travel there and see all the planets up close. That would be freaking awesome. But petroleum is a solid field to go into. Why, the only way we can produce hydrogen cheaply is by using hydrocarbon chains. It is the easiest way, since a hydrocarbon like methane contains 1 carbon and 4 hydrogens, it is easy to refine the hydrogen. On the other hand, electrolysis is not economical, since we don't have renewable resources giving us our electricity. What gives us 70-80 percent of our electricity, coal, natural gas, and oil. Plus, hydrogen car costs upwards of 100 grand. Now that is about the cost of a house, who in america can afford to buy that crap. So, whta you have my friend is a reliance on oil, oh so what about the hippies would talk about wind energy. Wind energy is costly and very expensive, so is solar, a solar field can only produce 1/3 of the power a hydrocarbon power plant can kick out, you have massive fields of wasted space, plus the panels have to be replaced. Those wind mills sound like a good idea, but guess who we would have to pay out the ying yang to get them from, the netherlands, we originally developed the technology, but sold it to them. Now they are the pioneers of wind technology. Wind techonology will only work for certain areas, and by no means can provide any sizeable amount of power. Solar and wind only make up 5 percent. Ok, what about nuclear, this is where the geology background comes in hand, lol. Uranium makes only, get this 0.00016 percent of the earths crust, and only 1 in 139 atoms of this element is uranium 235, the mack daddy of all uranium. The other 138 are uranium 238 and other varieties. Which cannot be used for nuclear power, worthless garbadge. Here is another tid bit, if we were to convert only to nuclear, we would exahaust the worlds uranium supply in 15 years, the Yucca mountain storage facility taht they have been working on to store waste if they ever would finish it, can already be filled to the max, with nuclear waste from the previous 50 years we have been using the stuff. We cannot, convert to it because the waste would overwhelm us, and it would be an environmental disaster. Oh what about biofuels. Biofuels are corrosive to engines. Because of their chemical make up, so that diesel engine that can go for hundreds of thousands of miles, will not go that far on biofuels, engines will need to be worked on, also the cost of this would be unbenifical. So what we have is a reliance on oil. The presidential canidates don't know (pooh). If we engineers can't figure out the problem, who will. And guess who is implementing all these new fuel sources, ding dong, the oil companies, ahahhahahahhhhahha. They realize the worlds energy usage will increase by 30 percent over the next 20 years. It will take everything to make it work. Oil is not going anywhere my friend. We will still be drilling for NG for a long time to come anyway. Plus, a petroleum engineering degree also is good for geothermal energy production, which is also pretty cool. But all these idiots who have no engineering background, like all of america who doesn't know the facts. They are in for a rude awakening. When the economy picks back up, oil is going to shoot through the roof, which means more bonuses and benifits in my pocket, and yours :) You won't see any "change happening" with Obama in office. If engineers can't solve the problem, no one can. Engineers are the solution, and guess what were not learning how to develop new forms of energy, were learning how the get the most oil out of the ground, because there is no other answer, none. So, don't listen to those idiots on CNN. It's all a joke. Since, 9/11 the USA has set up 40 airforce, marine, and army bases along the middle east, now why you think this is, we never had any there before. You know why, because when things go the hell, we going to have all we need to take that plot of land over, lol. There will be a day when we consider $4 a gallon gas as cheap. We have 100 nukes in just in Israel. lol, thanks to our jewish buddies. When the crap hits the fan, we are more than prepared.</p>
<p>
[quote]
All of our graduates are getting in the top 80ish to top 90's, some even in the hundreds for starting pay.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Really? All of them?</p>
<p>The average starting salary of LSU PetE grads in Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 was about 78k. The maximum salary was 86k. Remember, this was when the price of oil was far higher than it is today. </p>
<p>
[quote]
He just hired a petroleum engieering who worked with for another company, 10 years work of experience, the guy he hired is 32 years old, 330,000 a year
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I have never once heard of such an outlandish salary for a petroleum engineer. (Manager? Yes. But engineer? No.} The BLS also reports that while the top 10% of PetE's will make over 145k, that's still far far away from any 330k figure. </p>
<p>[url=<a href="http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos027.htm#earnings%5DEngineers%5B/url">http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos027.htm#earnings]Engineers[/url</a>]</p>
<p>
[quote]
Of course it all varies with companies or field choice, drillling engineers will make more than production, reservoir, will make more than production, but production is probably the easiest, you just chill, they have 22 year old's raking in 15,000 a month, lol
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I have never heard of any 22-year-old production engineers, presumably fresh out of school, making anywhere near 15k a month. Not even close.</p>
<p>if 22 year old production engineers made 15k a month. I would work 5 months a year and call it quits.</p>
<p>Forever LSU: I'm still in high school, but I intend to major in PE at A&M university since I live in Texas. I'm taking Calculus BC and Physics C right now. I don't mind working hard as long as I'm getting something in return. I'm going to a PE career fair tomorrow and I'll see how that goes. One question though: was it hard to get an internship at LSU?</p>
<p>In Louisiana,it's not what you know, it's who you know. Notice the line about his friend's dad working for a company that hired an engineer. </p>
<p>Have a friend at Texas A&M who after his freshman year in civil is doing great internships. That's the place to go. Just don't tell my longhorn brothers I said so. </p>
<p>My son's best friend's dad and grandfather both went to Rice and got ChemE degrees. Do very well. Wife doesn't have to work. Live in a gorgeous house. Had to live in Tulsa and Odessa for a while in the beginning, but now have it made. Have to fly to H-Town every once in a while and do some field work, but gets home every day at five otherwise and get to take a nice vacation every year. </p>
<p>Even though you're doing your AP classes in Calc and Physics, you should really take those courses again in college to get a good foundation. </p>
<p>Good luck to you. No matter how hard engineering is, stick with it. It will pay off in the future.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I have never once heard of such an outlandish salary for a petroleum engineer. (Manager? Yes. But engineer? No.} The BLS also reports that while the top 10% of PetE's will make over 145k, that's still far far away from any 330k figure.
[/quote]
They aren't called engineers. They are likely called drill site managers (but ~330K/year is likely offshore deepwater stuff). Also, you might be considered an independent contractor, so no benefits. They do not require an engineering degree. However, many petroleum engineers attempt to get these jobs due to the higher pay.</p>
<p>When we are talking about 300K/day for a deepwater rig/ship the drilling consultant cost is one that people will pay gladly, if the track record is there.</p>