What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
(OP)
All,
I am a mechanical engineer working for an oil & gas company as a project engineer doing maintenance & expansion projects.
I feel my role is mostly baby sitting other engineers at consulting companies called EPCs (engineering procurement construction) who also just oversee vendors/OEMs(original equipment manufacturer).
I want to do design as opposed to "project management" which is all there is oil and gas for mechanical engineers.
Can any of the seniors please guide me in a possible technical career path within oil and gas, preferably working on owner(not EPC) side.
I am a mechanical engineer working for an oil & gas company as a project engineer doing maintenance & expansion projects.
I feel my role is mostly baby sitting other engineers at consulting companies called EPCs (engineering procurement construction) who also just oversee vendors/OEMs(original equipment manufacturer).
I want to do design as opposed to "project management" which is all there is oil and gas for mechanical engineers.
Can any of the seniors please guide me in a possible technical career path within oil and gas, preferably working on owner(not EPC) side.





RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
I see some hints that the tide is starting to turn with this. Many companies have cut 2015 capital spending beyond the bone in response to the oil price collapse. At least some of them will come out of this knee-jerk reaction with modified expectations of their engineering staff. At a recent roll out of BP's spin off of their North American Onshore operations the management of the new team told staff "You are not competing with Exxon, or Conoco, you are competing with Devon and Noble". Devon and Noble are still international companies that have been totally infected by the PSM/Supply-Chain virus, at least the management of the new company has acknowledged the the big guys are doing it wrong. Maybe the second tier companies will get the message before everyone competent to engineer has moved on.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
There are some technical roles out there now in the operating companies, especially in the majors/ Tier 1 companies. You just have to make it known that you want a very technical role, and you need to be ready to commit to the technical, as opposed to management, ladder.
What area interests you?
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
It can be done, but it requires developing a track record and staying the hell away from high visibility Major Projects (that are way too big to run by the seat of your pants). Over time you'll notice that all of your bosses worked on the last mega project, and as your career advances you notice that your boss is about the age of your kids. If you can live with that then being the on-site techee can be fun and rewarding.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
The challenge for an early career engineer, is how to learn the technical aspects on the job in that sort of environment. Challenging...
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
The area I feel engineers are allowed to do some actual engineering as opposed to project management is in the actual processing facilities(refineries,processing plants,etc). That is why I am thinking about requesting to become a reliability/maintenance engineer or an operations/facilities engineer.
What are your thoughts
@TGS4
What role did you play as a mechanical engineer at an EPC? was it just vendor management or actual engineering?
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
The HR Thought Police will be reading this so I am limited in what else I can say.
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
I do a talk on exactly that, and you would not believe the reaction I get from both engineers and managers (i.e., hugely positive, standing ovation stuff). What causes me to despair is that every time I do the talk everyone goes back to their next meeting and/or to their spreadsheets and never consider actually doing things differently.
When I started in the industry in 1980, we had no access to EPC lobbyists to do our jobs for us. Today a production engineer thinks he "designed" a completion and stimulation plan by going to lunch with the Halliburton salesman (who paid for the lunch) and handing him a copy of the e-mail he got from the driller's consultant. I regularly ask young engineers "why did you pick this proppant instead of that one?" and get a deer in the headlights stare and a made-up BS answer (it is oh so easy to tell when an engineer has no idea of an answer and decides to make something up).
Just requiring company engineers to understand what they are being told by consultants would be a huge step in the right direction.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
I wish the top three or four tiers of management here could hear your lecture. I'm just not sure how many would listen.
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
It seems pipe stress engineering is as technical you can get in the mechanical engineering world?
@zdas04
Most of my coworkers believe the designs that they farm out to OEM/EPCs is theirs. They dont realise that they are just baby sitters. It makes me sick to see engineers turned to paper pushers.
Our boss says the reason why O&G companies dont do engineering in-house is because their core competency is running the plants not designing them.
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
How techical do you want? Hamiltonians?
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
I'm not sure its limited to O&G either.
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
That is exactly right. Why? Because that is their business need. The EPC's business is to do detail engineering. The producers/oil companies' business is to produce and sell oil, not do engineering. The producers hire the EPCs to do the detail engineering for them. The owner's engineers are hired to run projects and run the plant.
When I was a green engineer, I worked for a major. I asked the same exact questions you are asking. We had armies of EPCs doing the detail design and engineering for our projects. Me and the other engineers on staff with the owner only managed the projects, because that was the business need. I used to get all frosted up for the same reason you stated above: Why can't we do our own engineering in-house and get rid of the (alleged) EPC incompetents? (the voice of immaturity speaking there). My boss explained to me the same as yours did to you: that's not your job. You don't have time. Unless you want to work 120 hours a week, you simply don't have time to run all the calcs as well as supervise startup, order spare parts, hire the contractor, interface with Operations, plan the tie-ins, etc.
It also helps to remember that your engineering degree is a stepping stone, or a key to open doors. There are very very few engineers whose career looks anything even remotely like college. You have to get over that mindset. It's part of the transition process from college life to working in industry.
Bottom line: If you want to do design, go to work for an EPC or an equipment manufacturer/vendor. There are no design engineering jobs working for the oil companies. My suggestion to you, because this is what I did and worked really well, is to keep working the job you now have for five to eight years. You will learn about the oil business, about AFEs, about project economics, about the oil market. Then, go to work for an EPC doing detail. You will be heads and shoulders above our peers in the EPC because they don't have the first-hand knowledge that you do.
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
If you don't have some technical competence in house then you are just like the 80 year old lady that is ripped off by the plumber because she doesn't know what he's talking about. When the MBA's decided that engineering was not a core competency in Oil & Gas we should have fired all the MBA's and looked for a different answer.
When I started in the industry, operators had their own rigs, operators had their own roust abouts (and that was the only career path to becoming a pumper), and the engineers engineered their own projects. All of these things have been declared "non core" and they are farmed out. We are anything but better off for it. I am starting to see operators recognizing this failure and migrating back towards company rigs, company crews, and viable technical career paths, but the change is slow.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
While this is true, I gently beg to differ that this is a gross overgeneralization, i.e. that most EPCs are incompetent. I spent 11 years on the operator's side and 16 thus far on the EPC side. I can tell you with 100% certainty that over that time, I have met some very motivated and experienced individuals on both sides of the business. I have also met plenty of individuals not so, again on both sides of the business. Some of the owners' project engineers are flat-out useless AND incompetent.
Your third paragraph is spot-on and reflects my experience as well. That is the nature of the business nowadays and that is the hand of cards we have been dealt. My counsel remains to the OP, at least in the near-term: If you want to do detail engineering in the oil and gas business, go to work for an EPC or an equipment manufacturer for a few years.
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
As always any generalization is wrong much of the time. Most of the engineers I work with at EPC contractors are above average intelligence for engineers in this industry, I just keep seeing bright guys dropped into projects that they are not qualified to do. The result is rarely good. One of my colleagues at a Major hired an EPC to evaluate a pipeline we had just purchased. He asked me to go to the results meeting. The guy presenting was a civil engineer who had never done any pipe flow work. He addressed the problem by writing a single step "pipeline model" in Excel. His test data matched field data in zero locations. Most were no where close. He presented that result, then went on to recommend system modifications based on his model. Smart guy. Without a clue. Incompetent result. (BTW I built a real pipeline model of the system the next day, it suggested that all of his system modifications were very bad ideas)
I worked on a project last year where the EPC engineers were all really smart plant guys working on a field project. After the first hour of the week long kick off meeting I was so flabbergasted by the total lack of field knowledge that I volunteered to do a series of 5 lunch and learn modules to try to at least dissuade the concept that every well will be average ±3% in fluids, flow rates, pressures, and temperatures from the design conditions. These were smart guys who simply did not have the necessary tools to comprehend that a reservoir is going to give you what it gives you and your control is extremely limited. At the end of the week the $7 Billion project had identified almost $5 billion that didn't need to be spent in the first 10 years and everyone was happy, but getting the plant guys to accept that a well is not a plant feed required a concentrated effort. That effort to get talented people to understand the environment they find themselves in almost never happens. So I see multi-billion dollar projects fall off the tracks time after time because those oh so subtle and elegant solutions are Reynolds Number limited or can't handle 12000 mg/L TDS (when the design number was 10,000 mg/L), or one well making 50 times the expected average while 20 other make half or less.
I see so many medium-sized projects that are designed by people without relevant experience and without supervision by someone with relevant experience. The result is incompetent. The people a just people and on average they are a touch brighter than the average engineer, but having a brilliant electrical engineer design a wellsite separator does not lead to a competent result (I caught that one before we stuck welder to steel).
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
Take a look at thread378-383150: New pipeline engineer and see what I mean. This guy comes across as a pretty darn competent Pressure Vessel engineer who joined an EPC and is now the piping guy. He is unlikely to get much support within his company, and if he doesn't get guidance here he's going to make it up as he goes along. The result the first few times off the blocks are unlikely to be excellent.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
When I first got hired on, the engineering structure was basically a facility engineer responsible for an area. The facility engineer would be responsible for everything in the area, such maintenance, regulatory compliance, emergencies, identifying any future work etc. In addition, the other duty was project engineering, management, and technical/field support.
Detailed design engineering was either done in-house or contracted out depending on the complexity of the scope of work
In house work was basically initiated by the facilities engineer by creating a design criteria document. This is where design parameters of the project specified and internal/external departments would give their input. Once all the design criteria was finished, it would be handed it off to the design department, where a pipe designer would be assigned. The designer does all the design work design document specifications create the drawing.
When projects were contracted, then the facilities engineer would be the owners engineer. Basically you would be baby sitting the contracted project engineer.
You're probably thinking, well you have an in-house design department... why is work still contracted? Workload, time and cost is the best answer. We had an in-house design department that had first rights (union agreement) to any project. If they couldn't meet proposed deadline, then the engineering design, drafting and management would be contracted out. Also in-house design was a time consuming and bureaucratic process. It took time to get all the input from relevant departments to create your design guidelines document. After you finally get the relevant information for the design parameters, you have to give it to the design department and wait for the design package. IMHO this was the biggest bottleneck in the project execution processes. I never understood why it would take forever to get a simple drawing out of the design department.
If the engineering plans aren't completed in the calender year, then there was a high risk of losing the funding for the following year. If that happens, then the project sits in limbo until it becomes a big emergency that can't wait. Then the facility engineer is forced to take care of it immediately by bypassing the bureaucratic in-house process and getting whatever fixed or doing something to delay the inevitable ASAP. In the mix between all that is scoping other work, 3rd party municipal or regulatory info requests, answering questions from the designer, doing process improvement items, review red-line drawings, field engineering support, endless meetings, and dealing with other emergencies ( 3rd party dig-ins, leaks etc). I could ramble on and on, but the point is that project engineering was not the primary role as there were a lot of other responsibilities to attend to with work scope, leaks and digs-ins being the top of my hit list. When things get too busy, items tend to fall through the cracks. This happened far too often and was always a discussion point for process improvement meetings and maintenance operation folks.
This work structure existed for the longest time. At some point in time, there was a company reorganization with the direction of better project execution and near zero contract work. In managements view to accomplish this task, they decided to split the role of the facility engineer. The facility engineer would just be in charge of emergency maintenance, scoping and identifying work in his/her assigned area. Therefore, the project execution role was given to a project engineer. I had enjoyed the project execution role more than the other roles of a facilities engineer, so I requested a transfer into this new department. The in-house design was unchanged, which was create the high level parameters and give it to the design department. However, the only difference was that I could take a more active role in the design process instead of being bombarded with other responsibilities.
For the other projects that still needed to be contracted out, I initially thought it was a complete waste time to be the owners engineer for a consultant/EPC. Most if not all the consultants used to work for my company and they had complete access to our company standards library. There was one company initiative that changed my thinking on this.
Awhile back, upper management wanted to create a whole new department for asset replacement projects. There was a deadline to replace X number of vintage components classified as high risk per year and they knew it could never be done purely in-house and on time, so they contracted out the work to an engineering consultant. The consultant literally had a blank check and no engineering/design oversight to run this department. When another reorganization came with new upper management, they took a hard look at this special department. The consultant was creating incredible results,but management felt we could do better if it was brought inhouse. Management didn't just want to bring the work in-house, but they also wanted to copy the exact processes/procedures that the consultant used. This is where the trouble began. Adapting new processes and procedures at a blink of eye into a big company that's been doing it another way for the longest time is asking for trouble.
The consultant had the project engineer do all the detailed design work on paper, and a drafter created the formal engineering drawing based on the sketch. Well as I wrote before, our in-house engineering and design department worked differently. In-house project engineers do design, but not in that kind of fine detail. Upper management wanted us to copy exactly what the consultant did, so we had to adapt to being a design engineer and drafter, which had good/bad results. The bad was that I got pulled into this department mainly because I had previous design and drafting experience. Therefore my primary role was to review the design packages before it was handed to the design department. It nice to do drafting for a change; however many of the in-house project engineers, who had just been managing the engineering for the longest time could not do detailed design. The ones that adapted quickly were previously employed at a consultant or had worked in our design department before moving on. Another bad thing was that the project engineer was doing detailed design, which is a union shop responsibility. Therefore, there were a few designers that thought their job was being taken away and and this lead to a few union grievances.
Engineering drawing standard was another issue as the consultant had created drawings using their own proprietary standard. We reached an agreement to use the exact drawing template which caused heated arguments with the design and project engineering department. One argument that I recall and agreed with was that the contractors drawings were essentially telling the crews how to install pipe, instead of just showing the final product or intent. Therefore, you could say it's a hybrid design/assembly/instruction manual drawing. They were essentially trying to cram every detail and assembly process into a single drawing that lead to a convoluted product and messy redline from the field.
In the end, this only lasted for 2-1/2 years before management abandoned trying to convert the engineering and design department to function exactly like the contractor had done. I think that was mostly because management discovered that our in-house cost was far too high compared to the historical averages. Therefore, we looked for ways to adapt certain aspects and not a complete conversion of the contractors process. The point here is that you may feel that you have to baby sit the contractor, but there is a reason that you have to.
I was fortunate the major that I joined did in-house work, or I would have been bored just like the OP is experiencing. Also I consider myself lucky that I did design and drafting before switching jobs. I've met engineers hired straight out of college, who are routinely thrown into the project engineering role without relevant experience. Without the experience, you are essentially managing the technical side of engineering, but not understanding if the in-house designer or contracted engineer did the design correctly or makes sense.
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
You will need to drill down. The best design opportunities are at smaller companies, further down from the top tier.
Consider also design opportunities in other fields. It may be easier to take a route to O&G design via design in some other field.
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
It takes ages to build a specialist in a certain field / product / component. It takes personal and life time sacrifice (moral and financial) for people to acquire knowledge and become a problem solver in Oil & Gas industry.
With knowledge comes salary, respect, consideration and reputation; consideration also encourages toward seeking excellence and spreading this excellence around in company. This virtous cycle is nowadays broken. And since nature does not like vacuum, respect is replaced with envy and jaleousy, merit is replaced with unfairness. One can go on and on.
Worse is the following; If you follow the golden rule "first do not harm"...well these crooks have broken this rule because not only they do not improve the background of people but can even become harmful to competent people. I do not advocate to sit back or lay down and let the company develop you, you are in charge of your personal development - but till a certain point your life depends from the quality of your work environment and your peers- sorry.
People from management down to lower layers, unfortunately often layers with technical background, are treating people like an adjustment variable in their "engineering progress curve" whereby in this three words sequence, they are blind to understand the implication of the first as long as the progress curve is sharp enough. By playing with workforce adjustment and reduction like simply pushing on a joystick they claim proudly how they set the benchmark in engineering execution.
I dont know about all EPCs companies, but to me an "incompetent EPC" is definitely something that practically exists and (will) continue to do business.
"If you want to acquire a knowledge or skill, read a book and practice the skill".
RE: What is technical role a mechanical engineer can do in oil & gas
I dont see how EPC companies can become competent without investing in people.
"If you want to acquire a knowledge or skill, read a book and practice the skill".