Engineering: How to work in petroleum industry

By Alistair Jones   

It’s called the big crew change and it’s a top priority for the petroleum industry. At issue is how to find the next generation of petroleum engineers to replace an ageing workforce.

“The industry is desperately crying out for people,” says Steve Begg, head of the Australian School of Petroleum at the University of Adelaide. “There’s a large number of people who are about 50 [years old] and they’ll be moving out of the industry during the next five to 10 years.” These workers comprise a “big demographic hump” and there’s a gap behind them.

One source of new employees is the ASP, which was founded in 2003 with $25 million from Adelaide-based oil and gas company Santos. “Since we’ve been in operation our undergraduate petroleum engineers have achieved about a 99 per cent employment rate,” Begg says.

For professionals wanting to improve their skills or make a career change, ASP offers a master of petroleum engineering.

“It’s a conversion masters,” Begg says. “It’s designed for people who don’t have a petroleum background, such as mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, civil engineers and electrical engineers, who want to convert to be petroleum engineers.”

The course is delivered on campus and takes one year to complete full-time, or up to four years part-time. The program also allows industry professionals to cherry-pick specific units to get up to date in a particular area, without seeking to complete the full masters.

“A lot of the course units are [taught as] intensive weeks, or as an intensive seven days, and then there’s usually some form of assignment and extra reading,” Begg says. “The number of contact hours is identical [for all types of student]. It’s just that [a part-time] student has to do more follow up by themselves, and have the self-discipline to do that.

“All of the class material goes up online for the students to use, but it’s not an online course. [You] couldn’t take it from a remote location.”

Among the part-time students is 26-year-old drilling engineer Tegan Digby. She completed a bachelor of chemical engineering at the University of Queensland before being recruited by Santos under its graduate intake program. Digby is one of eight Santos employees in the present masters intake of about 20 and has been fitting study around her work commitments since 2008.

“I wouldn’t say it’s easy but it’s doable,” she says.

“At [UQ] I learned a lot of the fundamentals of engineering but not how they get applied in petroleum engineering. There’s on-the-job training at work but it’s good to sit down and focus on the ins and outs that you sometimes don’t get exposure to on the job.”

The APS sees a bright future for petroleum engineers in a world dependent on oil and gas.

“In spite of the increase in consumption during the past 30 years or so, the world’s production has managed to keep up with it,” Begg says.

New technologies have allowed resources to be converted into reserves and the projected life span of world reserves remains at 40 years, the same as it was 40 years ago. And that’s just at the present recovery rate of about 35 per cent.

In 1973, the then Saudi oil minister Zaki Yamani famously said: “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.”

Says Begg: “The petroleum age probably won’t end because we’ve run out of petroleum. It will likely be because we’ve changed to more efficient ways of producing energy.”

Either way, there will still be work for engineers.

Article from The Australian, May 2011.