Engineers Need To Learn From History Because the Industry Tends To Repeat It

Abstract

In the 2 years since oil prices plunged, job cuts and retirements have changed the face of petroleum engineering. SPE’s membership mix has shifted to younger, with the biggest numbers in their 20s and 30s. “We have seen most of the older generation wiped out. It is pretty scary seeing the people being asked to leave” who have so much knowledge, said Tom Blasingame, the technical director for reservoir description and dynamics. There are still Baby Boomers left in the ranks, and they want to pass on what they have learned from experience. The seven SPE directors interviewed for this story began their careers during the long-lasting funk that began in the early 1980s and lingered through the 1990s. At last year’s SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE) in Dubai, they offered their perspectives in a discussion titled “The Way to Move Forward is to Look Back.” While the oil market seems to have settled into a narrow range and the pace of layoffs slowed later in the year, these are still hard times. “Unfortunately a lot of people are losing their jobs; that is happening across the world and across the industry, even in national oil companies,” said Hisham Saadawi, technical director for production and facilities. “The perception is prices will remain like this now.” The pressure to cut costs remains intense, including personnel budgets. Even some top students from Texas A&M University are hearing from companies that “we do not have the budget to hire now,” said Blasingame, a petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M, adding that for many, “the anxiety meter is off the scale.” Fewer students are enrolling in petroleum engineering programs in the US and elsewhere because it no longer ensures a good-paying job, with some schools seeing declines of 50% or more in their incoming classes. “There is no panic. I am sensing the biggest concern is the job situation for graduates. That is pretty tough in many places,” said Dan Hill, director for academia. For the faculty in many programs, there is a positive side to the declines in enrollment: the lowering of class sizes to more desirable levels.