The oil biz runs on any number of underlying knowledge- and skill-sets, which ought to mean that there are other options for those with university educations in geology, chemistry, various flavors of engineering, and even finance/accounting/management/law. Just how specialized is the curriculum that points an undergraduate at the oil sector? (FWIW, my 1960s undergrad English major pointed me at teaching–and some of my classmates at law school. I eventually wound up in tech journalism. Go figure.)
4 Likes
All else being equal, at least these people are all early 20s and realising they need to change focus. It may seem daunting but they will get over it - and for the most part they are coming from a privileged background that will ensure a soft landing.
I think a real reason there is so much resistance in places like Texas and Alberta is that there are many people in their 30s, 40s and 50s in these industries and pivoting will be a bit more difficult for them.
It’s also the dream job pitfall. Job satisfaction is a lot more than what you do - it’s also how you get to do it and the people you get to do it with.
3 Likes
From what I’ve read, the fracking industry was headed into decline before covid… The practice is producing so much excess natural gas that they are just burning it on site (and releasing tons of carbon and other stuff in the process). It got to the point last year, again before covid, that natural gas had a negative value in Texas…
This is all about the boom/bust cycle of hype, frenzied investment, decline, and abandonment that has been part of oil and gas for two centuries… I can’t believe governments are subsidizing the building of natural gas pipelines in this context… The costs of cleanup are always placed on the backs of the public, while ordinary people face the double-whammy of loss of employment and the degradation of their local environment.
5 Likes
Nothing like looking to the past to find forward-thinking individuals who made their fortunes on oil, then emulating them but missing the part where they were forward-thinking (or, in most cases, just lucky) and then wondering why you wasted your time pursuing a job in a dying industry.
2 Likes
please say health insurance, please say health insurance, please say health insurance
7 Likes
Deciding to start a career in the petroleum industry in the 2020s is like deciding to start a career in the whale oil industry in the 1890s.
4 Likes
I’m sympathetic to most people dealing with industry collapse. I grew up in a town shattered by industrial closures and work in a different dying industry. I feel absolutely zero sympathy for these kids. James Hansen’s Senate testimony was in '88. That is roughly far enough in the past to go from birth to PHD, in a world where this was an acknowledged issue. Even someone inattentive would have noticed once Al Gore won his almost Oscar 13 years ago. If you aimed to enter the oil industry at this point, you were planning to ride the wave until it crashed and killed a bunch of other people.
6 Likes
It’s hard to believe that anyone could get deep into ChemE and PetE without knowing this. When I started as a ChemE major even in the mid '90s not a single professor suggested that PetE was a stable or boring field. Periods of stupid-high pay spaced out with unemployment. Of course most of my classmates noped out of that for safe careers at Intel (oops).
3 Likes
Some people in Nigeria have become extremely rich thanks to oil. But they didn’t work in the oil industry, if you know what I mean.
2 Likes
1st world problems.
If you can’t make money screwing the earth because of economics, then you might help me in my manufacturing company which makes tiny sting instruments.
Or you can just stop helping pump fossil fuels out of the ground, and start learning about how wind, solar, and tide can do the same thing.
2 Likes
Back in the day, I took a class, in Community College, on programming in PASCAL. Luckily I had my history major to back me up.
4 Likes
I graduated in geology in the 1980s, pretty much the only people who were hiring were oil and gas companies in the North Sea who couldn’t get people who knew one end of a rock from the other fast enough.
I ended up charting Chernobyl fallout across Scotland - so I might have been ethically sound, but god I was cold, wet and poor…
7 Likes
Sounds pretty interesting though, curious what the data for the fallout in Scotland looked like though that might be a derail of the topic 
I grew up in oil country, to the extent that we had wells drilled on our property, so I got to sit on the rigs and chat with the field geologists now and then. I was interested in geology as a career because I recognized that it had many applications. I also saw the boom and bust cycle of oil in the 70s and 80s. That geologist could be working 60-80 hour weeks one year and part time leading tours at the natural history museum the next year…
I still became a geologist. I started in groundwater work, as I knew water would be necessary far longer than oil, then dovetailed into environmental.
Ironically (or perhaps not), with the number of petroleum site cleanups I’ve done, I still drill for oil…
As to current career prospects, I lurk r/geologycareers to see what the kids are up to, and there are still inquiries on the petroleum industry, even in light of everything. As far as the classic extractive geology careers, though, I still see the mining industry hiring, as the ‘green’ economy has a thirst for rare earth metals for solar and batteries, and gold is still gold.
8 Likes
Plastics and other organic chemicals will still need petroleum as feedstock, no? Maybe heavier grades of crude will rise in comparable value in this regard. Natural gas will be used in home heating for many years to come. NG is also feedstock for fertilizer production.
1 Like
True - and it’s still probably the best source of long-chain hydrocarbons for refining the carbon fibers.
1 Like
this is the bourgeois professional version of “won’t somebody please think of the coal miners”
4 Likes
Right. My memory is that the US only started being a net exporter a decade ago and energy independent. That was only because of the viability of fracking, which everyone hates. Before that the easy oil in North America was getting harder and harder to access. With climate change, renewable energy, etc it’s been an losing war that got a short term extension. Oil and gas companies have been planning for even longer how to transition.
I realize a 22 year old might have missed much of this. But I would hope they’d discuss this in first year classes or with people older than they are.
2 Likes
That’s the part that jumped out to me too. This is someone laser focused on how to make the most money, with no ethical foundation or legitimate passion for their work. Those are literally the two highest paying and most ethically bankrupt jobs a person can choose.
Any 22yo who doesn’t know about climate change and doesn’t feel bad about going to work in that industry is willfully ignorant to a frightening degree. Maybe flipping burgers for a while, working alongside the people climate change will hurt the most, will give these kids some much needed perspective.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
