The Oilpatch is Recruiting—Join Now

The need for top-notch engineers of all types as well as geologists and geophysicists fills headlines of industry-focused journals of all kinds. Recruiters fill the halls of the top universities as operating and services companies join the ranks of football scouts trying to pick up the brightest and most talented candidates for All-Star teams.

People shortage

An American Petroleum Institute study offers the reason for that recruiting blitz. The industry’s top hands are getting older, and too few replacements are coming on board. Oil and gas will need 30,000 new petroleum engineers by 2009 just to replace the engineers eligible to retire at that time. In 2004, 1,500 students were enrolled in petroleum engineering courses in the United States. That number is climbing, but it’s still significantly short of the need.

When the survey was conducted in 2005, the average age of an engineer was 41, and the age bracket hasn’t improved. The average age of the total industry workforce was 51 at the time, said Mark Rubin, executive director of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, and that number hasn’t improved either.

Those shortages, however, are largely a problem in the United States. China and India, for example, have a surplus of engineers.
Shortages don’t have to be a problem in the United States either, said Stephen A. Holditch, head of the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University and 2002 Society of Petroleum Engineers president. The average age of petroleum engineers in the United States may be more than 50, but the average age internationally is about 42.

He also suggested a campaign to let young people know that:
• “We are a growing industry,
• “We are a high-technology industry, and
• “We are a global industry.”

Additional benefits, he said, are that the shortage means new employees will move up the corporate ladder more quickly, and the business of producing energy increases standards of living while protecting the environment.

As older workers face retirement, the industry faces an expansion binge unprecedented in more than a generation.

Show me the money

Look at employment in the oil and gas industry as an opportunity for personal, fast track growth, a chance to provide the world with necessary commodities and reduce pollution or as a challenging trip into some of the highest technology on the planet. The high pay is just a bonus, an important bonus for most people, and the size of the paycheck depends on what a person does and where the person works.

Benefits can add to the already attractive salaries. In recent years, bonuses have averaged about 25% of base pay for professional and technical people. Climbing oil and gas prices have fostered a share-the-wealth attitude in the boardroom. Bonuses of 40% of base salaries weren’t uncommon when oil prices reached their peak.

A couple of factors go into those bonuses. The first measure is individual performance or the performance of the specific group in which an individual works. Meet deadlines, project objectives for profitability, and the bonus shows up. The second measure depends on the overall profitability of the company. The company also must meet or exceed performance goals to earn the additional bonus.

The U.S. Labor Department has some ideas about oil and gas.

“Oil and natural gas furnish about three-fifths of our energy needs, fueling our homes, workplaces, factories and transportation systems. In addition, they constitute the raw materials for plastics, chemicals, medicines, fertilizers and synthetic fibers,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Working conditions vary significantly by occupation.

“Roustabout jobs and jobs in other construction and extraction occupations may involve rugged outdoor work in remote areas in all kinds of weather. For these jobs, physical strength and stamina are necessary,” according to the BLS. “This work involves standing for long periods, lifting moderately heavy objects and climbing and stooping to work with tools that are often oily and dirty. A lot more people work in offices, and geologists, engineers and managers may work in the field part of the time and in the office the rest of the time.”

Although opportunities for part-time work are rare, a higher percentage of workers in oil and gas work overtime than in all other industries combined.

“The average non-supervisory worker in the oil and gas extraction industry worked 43.5 hours per week in 2004, compared with 33.7 hours for all non-supervisory workers on private non-farm payrolls,” according to the BLS.

Oil and gas has a reputation for being a dangerous industry, and it once was, but that has changed. BLS figures show the rate of work-related injury and illness in the oil and gas extraction industry in 2003 was a little less than two per 100 full-time workers. The injury rate for all private-sector jobs was five per 100 workers.

Work hours can be a benefit or a drawback, depending on the attitude of the individual. Typically, onshore drilling crews work 6 days straight, 8 hours a day and then get a few days off. Offshore crews normally work 12-hour days for 14 days straight and then get 14 days off ashore. Exploration and drilling workers may work away from home weeks at a time until a specific job is finished. A hand on a drilling rig goes where the rig goes or where the company sends him or her.

Field operations employees normally stay in one place as long as they tend a field. Any worker in the extraction part of the industry will live in one of the 42 states in the United States that produces oil or gas, and three-quarters of all oilpatch workers in the United States were stationed in California, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

See the world

Those who wish to expand their horizons beyond the Lower 48 have myriad choices. No other industry offers the oil and gas industry’s opportunity to improve conditions in developing nations, visit the most exotic countries in the world and improve a dedicated person’s promotion potential.

Outside North America, the high-action areas include the North Sea off the United Kingdom and Norway in Europe. This area is a world front-runner in environmental care with strict rules for rig inspections as well as drilling and production activities.

Brazil, Peru and Colombia are active in South America. Brazil reached self-sufficiency in oil, and now it’s concentrating on lowering gas imports. Companies developing natural gas in Peru are building that country’s first liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant. Colombia, once feared as anti-government groups made a regular practice of kidnapping, now offers independent operators opportunities to flourish onshore and off the Caribbean coast.

Offshore West Africa and Egypt, Algeria and Libya in northern Africa see a lot of exploration and development work. Libya recently emerged from a long period of sanctions that smothered its oil and gas industry, and it’s making up for lost time. Offshore West Africa is one corner of the golden triangle of deepwater exploration along with Brazil and the Gulf of Mexico. Huge fields have been discovered offshore Nigeria, Angola and Equatorial Guinea, and the search continues into deeper water.

The gas bonanza offshore Western Australia has operators tapping huge fields and planning at least three new LNG plants. Chevron and its partners are developing the Greater Gorgon area off the coast, a group of fields with an estimated 40 Tcf of gas reserves, more reserves than the North Slope of Alaska and more than most nations can claim.

Most of the Middle East is ramping up to meet world demand. Saudi Arabia plans to increase its production capacity from 9 million barrels per day to 12 million barrels per day in 2012 by increasing production from known fields.

Farouk Al-Zanki, chairman and managing director of the Kuwait Oil Co., speaking at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) Week conference, said his country would raise production from its current 2.5 million barrels per day to 3 million barrels per day in 2010 and 4 million barrels per day in 2020.

In Asia, China and India are working hard offshore and onshore to find more domestic oil and gas for their fast-growing economies. China is trying to line up deals to import oil and gas from Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and it is in full exploration mode inside its borders. The nation also has become a leader in extracting more oil out of existing fields.

Risk

Concerned about risk? Choose your level. Conoco-Phillips ranked Canada, the United States, Norway, the United Kingdom and Australia in the negligible-risk category. Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Brazil and Egypt fell into the moderate-risk ranking. For significant risk, look to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Venezuela, Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Indonesia, China, Kazakhstan and Mexico. That’s not personal risk. That’s business risk. The lone country in the high-risk category is Iraq.

Risk aside, the international oil market is an ideal place to seek work. It offers significant opportunity, a selectable degree of risk, high pay and benefits, and an opportunity to observe progress first-hand.

Globally, oil and gas companies will spend almost $300 billion this year on exploration and production, according to the latest spending survey from Smith Barney. That’s up from $113 billion in 2000 and $175 billion in 2004. The main bottleneck holding back the industry is the shortage of drilling rigs and services in many of the busiest areas.

Another bottleneck is a shortage of qualified people, and the industry is willing to pay for the privilege of getting those people.