Fifth Major: Petroleum-Engineering

If you do a simple search for the highest paid major in college you'll easily find petroleum-engineering in the top of the list. With an early career pay of 94,600$ for a bachelor, I think it will be a good choice. In the following you'll have a general idea about this major.

Definition

Petroleum engineering is that branch of engineering that involves the development and exploitation of crude oil and natural gas fields as well as the technical analysis and forecasting of their future performance.

Petroleum engineering overlaps with many engineering disciplines such as civil, chemical and mechanical. Like every branch in engineering, to be a successful engineer you should have a strong knowledge in math, physics, science skills, and creative problem-solving abilities. In order to start your career as a petroleum engineer, need to take two exams offered by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying. Now what do petroleum engineers do?

Petroleum Engineers duties

As I said before the exploitation of crude oil and natural gas is the main part in this major. For this reason, petroleum engineers should design and develop methods to extract them from deposits below the Earth's surface in a first place. How they do this?

Petroleum engineers explore the environment where they study the geological and geophysical information to determine what kind of equipments they need.

After locating the new reservoir they will extract from, they design equipments, tools, and machines so they can extract oil products.


Another thing they should do, is to make drilling and extracting plans to pump out the hydrocarbons in the most efficient way, and to recover them. To control all the machines responsible of the procedure, petroleum engineers should operate softwares.
When the machines start working, the engineer is responsible of the maintenance of drilling and pumping equipment on the site.
Additionally, petroleum engineers must make reports to evaluate the production of wells through surveys, testing and analysis. After ending the process, petroleum engineers supervise the safe removal of drilling equipments. A single engineer can't do all these tasks of course; the following are examples of types of petroleum engineers.

Completion engineers

Completion engineers design and monitor the installation of cost-effective well completions. He must direct and monitor the completion and evaluation of well testing. He must also coordinate the installation, maintenance and operation of mining and oil field equipments.

Reservoir engineers

Reservoir engineers are those who estimate reserves for property evaluation and development planning. They carry out reservoir stimulation studies to optimize recoveries. Another task, reservoir engineers estimate the size of a reservoir and determine how much this reservoir can reserve oil and gas.

Drilling engineers

A drilling engineer manages the safe and efficient drilling of wells to produce oil and gas. He's also responsible of collecting and analyzing data relating to output, daily production and extraction. He will calculate the cost of heavy machinery and the construction of platforms and other structure in addition.

Production engineers

A production engineer's job involves managing the boundaries between the well and the reservoir. They are also asked to make modifications to maximize the efficiency and oil and gas recovery.

Conclusion

To be a petroleum engineer isn't that easy; not only the work itself is difficult but working in locations were the climate is harsh demands lots of efforts. Don't forget you have many tasks, especially in communicating between all kinds of engineers to have the best income. Now here's an interview with a petroleum engineer to get under the surface of his occupation.