The Complete Guide to Becoming A Petroleum Engineer

Chapter 1: What Does a Petroleum Engineer Actually Do?

Let's start by clearing the air: petroleum engineering is not one single job, and it's not the same everywhere. If you ask five different petroleum engineers what they do, you'll get five different answers, because the field splits into three main branches, and each one has a completely different rhythm to the day. But before we get to the branches, let's talk about what unites them.

At its core, a petroleum engineer figures out how to get oil and natural gas out of the ground, efficiently, safely, and profitably. That's it. The whole job is about solving the puzzle of how to extract hydrocarbons from rock formations that can sit miles beneath the surface. You're not the person with the hard hat physically drilling the hole - that's the drilling crew. You're not the person who decides whether to sell the oil to a refinery in the Gulf or a chemical plant in Ohio - that's a commercial or trading role. Your job sits in between: you design the wells, you figure out how to operate them, and you'll make sure the whole extraction process is technically sound and won't blow up or leak into a nearby river.

There are three main flavors of petroleum engineering. The first is reservoir engineering. If you're a reservoir engineer, you're the person who looks at a big, dark, computer model of an underground rock formation and asks: how much oil is actually in