<p>I realize there are plenty of threads on PetE, but I thought it would be helpful to stop beating around the bush and approach this logically. This is only one small part of the puzzle, so my personal factors in whether or not I do end up majoring in PetE isn't very relevant right now.</p>
<p>So, obviously any question of salary has to do with supply and demand; clearly a large demand for PetE in the lucrative oil field allows employers to pay their engineers enormous amounts of money. My question is, what exactly keeps the supply (#of graduating PetEs) so low?</p>
<p>Scientifically, drilling for oil thousands of feat below the ocean seems as intriguing as any engineering career. Is it because they are the cream of the crop amongst engineers? I don't see that, as I feel that there are plenty of MIT and Cal Berkeley graduates who perhaps more capable than say, a middle of the class PetE from LSU. So what exactly are the main reasons why so few students choose to pursue a career that is probably THE best option in terms of salary to education ratio and thus keep the average salaries so high? Is it the difficulty in family life? Perhaps some health hazards from being around crude oil? The excessive traveling?.......</p>
<p>One factor that may dissuade some potential petroleum engineers is that working in the oil field is a huge time commitment of reporting at 6 am and working pretty late. You need to travel to the job and there is typically not a huge variety of workplaces (lots of these jobs are in Texas) so that can also be a turnoff to some people. I’m not exactly sure of the daily workload so someone please comment on that. I’m not an expert on this but I’ve read about the job and learned of its pros/cons.</p>
<p>There are a few reasons why Petroleum engineers are well paid:</p>
<p>1 - Lack of supply. There are only a handful of accredited petroleum engineering departments in the nation. Collectively they produce only a couple hundred graduates each year, which is barely enough to keep up with demand as oil and gas companies need new graduates to help bring online new production. Additionally, petroleum engineering is one of the few fields where there really is a wave of retirees who are leaving the field. Lastly, salaries for experienced petroleum engineers are so high that it’s almost impossible for schools to attract faculty to start new departments.</p>
<p>2 - Working conditions. As mentioned before, many petroleum engineers spend the first few years of their careers working in the field for 12-18 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week with very little vacation. It’s not a glamorous job, and for many not exactly what they look forward to in a career.</p>
<p>3 - Lots of cash slushing around in oil and gas companies. Oil and gas is extremely lucrative, so companies spend lots of money attracting “top talent” which has started a wage war. You can literally move companies every two years and get a hefty raise each time you do so, and no one will blink an eye in an oil and gas company, because so many people do this.</p>
<p>Overall though, I wouldn’t recommend petroleum engineering unless someone thinks they’re really passionate about it. A lot of people go into the field because of the high salary, but then find out that the job is not anything like they imagined and wind up very miserable.</p>
<p>Disagree. As a major, PetE seems to be one of the easier engineering degrees.</p>
<p>It just is only desirable to two specific subsets of people: those who legitimately find it interesting and those who are just in it for the money and can stand all the drawbacks.</p>
<p>You think building a reservoir simulator is easy? that was part of our core curriculum. Trust me, PE is more difficult then it first appears. Modeling fluid flow in heterogeneous dual porosity multi drive multiphase systems 1000s of feet underground is not easy. It definitely requires a different type of engineer than your book smart MIT grad since so much of it is people oriented though. There is a big difference between solving a complex problem and actually implementing the proposed solution.</p>
<p>Personally I just hate oil companies and don’t want to work in a field that will hopefully die at some point during this century. We can do better than burning hydrocarbons to get energy.</p>
<p>A lot of people would rather get a job paying the same money where they’d have to get ripped apart by the Cenobites and put back together a dozen times a day. I mean, the location is a lot better for one, and it doesn’t require as much formal education, so you’d save on tuition.</p>
<p>The vice-president of the largest oil producer in my state told me that the reason petroleum engineers make so much money is the petroleum engineers make money for the company. Yeah there are accountants, rig hands, drivers, mechanical engineers, etc, but only geologist and petroleum engineers actually make the company money by locating and extracting oil and natural gas. There are also many other factors such as working many hours, increasing demand for energy, retirement of current engineers, working in remote locations, etc.</p>
<p>I don’t care if it is 1000 feet underground or 1000 lightyears away in another galaxy, physics is physics. The laws of fluid motion apply the same in a reservoir as they do in the atmosphere as they do in the formation of nebulae. You just change the boundary conditions.</p>
<p>But that is beside the point. How many petroleum engineers build a reservoir simulator at work as opposed to directing traffic and making engineering decisions out at the drill site? Not very many. Of course, all’s fair, you could make a similar argument about most if not every engineering degree.</p>
<p>There’s the demand side explanation. What he left out is the supply side. If the demand is so strong, why is the supply not meeting the demand? I might be opening a can of worms, but petroleum engineering is not fundamentally harder than EE, AE, ChemE, etc. </p>
<p>It’s too simple to say that the supply is low because it’s not taught at a lot of schools. When pharmacists were making a killing, a dozen new pharmacy schools opened up.</p>
<p>PetE is on the top of the salary charts for undergrads, and half the posts on here about PetE are related in some way to that. If it wasn’t at the top of the charts, it probably wouldn’t have crossed most of your minds. I’m not saying that PetE can’t be someone’s passion, but I think for every aspiring engineer who’s dream is to make a career out of getting oil out of the ground, there are a hundred who dream of figuring out how not to need to anymore.</p>
<p>Of course there are also issues for people like the locations and attitudes about working in the industry.</p>
<p>The reason oil companies exist is because oil is worth a lot. The reason oil is worth a lot is because there is a high demand for it. A demand from you and every other person taking part in our industrialized society. Whether you like it or not you’re addicted to oil so you can cut the holier-than-thou BS. It’s like snorting a line of blow every couple hours every day of your life and then saying “I hate coke dealers”.</p>
<p>As for the actual question, I’ll say a few things:</p>
<p>1) Supply of PetrE’s stays low because of the nature of the industry. For the most part you have to work where the oil is. Not an attractive option for loads of people.</p>
<p>2) PetrE’s are at the heart of an oil company, the success of the company will depend largely on successful engineering. Oil companies sell commodities and so they’re price takers, that eliminates most of the marketing/image that is so important in many other industries. For example one could argue marketing/image is just as important to a company like Apple as is the actual product they offer. This may cause oil companies to regard their engineers more highly than most companies in most other industries, and therefore be willing to pay them more.</p>
<p>3) When the price of oil is high, profit margins are fat. Everyone in the industry is making a killing, not just the engineers. There’s plenty of HS drop outs pulling in 100k+ a year when the price of oil is high.</p>
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<p>It’s not just about the schools that offer the degree, its about where you’ll be working when you graduate. A pharmacist can work in any town in North America. Being a PetrE grad you can pretty much forget about landing a job in the majority of US/Canadian cities.</p>
<p>Also, there seems to be a pretty wide spread grim outlook for the oil industry lately that may be contributing to the lack of kids going into PetrE. Especially among those not living in an oil producing region, who tend to be not very well informed on the industry itself. You’ll find many people who believe oil will be gone in the near future, 5, 10, 15 years from now. There’s also many people that think we won’t need oil in the near future. Really the only person that supported me when I said I wanted to do PetrE was my father. Everyone else I knew thought I was stupid for going into a soon to be dead industry.</p>
<p>I agree with you<em>of</em>eh. When i first wanted to do petroleum engineering
everybody around me told me oil is gonna either run out or be ineffiecient in a couple
of years. The main thing that attracted me to petroleum engineer was the fact that one
of the first sources that spoke about it said that the field was a gamble. I like
gambling so why not. Even when the oil well blowout occurred in the gulf some years
back. I remember well known posters like ForeverLSU saying that its impossible getting
a job. Might be like that again when i graduate.</p>
<p>But the rewards are worth the risks to me. really a choice between stability and
taking risk career wise. at least i think so.</p>
<p>There really isn’t a risk… for now. The question isn’t if oil will run out and be phased out of the world economy, but when. Now, I know that is a hotly debated topic, but chances are anyone graduating from college around now has more than a career’s worth of oil production left in the world, so they will be fine. What is less clear is the children of that same generation.</p>
<p>That is also a pretty good partial reason why schools don’t elect to start up new departments in petroleum engineering despite it being a hotly recruited job right now. It would simply take too long to develop and by the time the department was mature, oil would be declining. With that in mind, I only see the salaries of petroleum engineers going up from here until at least the production peak. After that, getting into the field would be more risky.</p>
<p>So just because I’m dependent on oil, I’m not allowed to complain about oil companies? That’s ridiculous.</p>
<p>Anyways, all I’m saying is that I would rather not be part of a dying (albeit slowly), environmentally unsound industry that is pillaging our collective wallets. If I were in the energy industry, I would much rather research newer technologies and figure out a viable replacement (or set of replacements) for oil.</p>
<p>You do know the oil companies do and fund the majority of renewable energy research and implementation right? So if you want to work in that industry you may be surprised to find yourself working for or funded by BP or Chevron…</p>