Shared Vision (March 2005)
Authors: Paccaloni Giovanni 
Published: February 2015

Everyone will remember the oil price collapse of the mid-1980s and the related layoffs and hiring freezes. At that time, the industry, which had hired aggressively for more than 10 years (1973-1984) and built up large staffs, entered a period of austerity, characterized by almost unending restructuring, reorganizations, mergers, consolidations, downsizings, layoffs, and cost cutting in virtually every sector, including R&D. The doors of most operating companies were sealed to the many new university graduates looking for a post at the same time that many employees at those companies were losing their jobs. The lack of recruitment, combined with widespread job cutting, drastically reduced employment in the industry. Our industry’s reputation deteriorated, and energy was no longer seen as an attractive career by most. Many of the displaced upstream professionals discouraged their children from careers in the petroleum industry, concerned that the downward spiral would continue. Major accidents, with huge spills from oil super-tankers, the loss of offshore platforms and human lives, and images of dense black smoke produced by hundreds of wells simultaneously on fire, have also contributed to the public’s critical view of the petroleum industry. The negative picture of our industry resulted in a remarkable decrease of students in geology and petroleum engineering curricula.

In recent years, to guarantee their future, most oil and service companies have begun hiring geologists, engineers, and geophysicists after a long period of little employment activity. But the earlier events have caused a drastic change in our industry’s demographics, shown in Fig. 1. A large part of today’s workforce is made of those who survived the restructurings, and the average age of E&P employees has shifted from about 43-45 to 48-50 years of age. These employees are typically extremely busy, with little time left for mentoring, and likely will retire within 5 to 10 years. It is not difficult to envision a critical need to replace this huge amount of outgoing senior expertise.

Our industry must recruit, train, and rapidly develop the brightest, most creative, well educated, and environmentally and socially responsible young talents. To have the best chance of success, our industry must have ample and permanent availability of skilled students choosing petroleum and energy as an extremely exciting and challenging career. Furthermore, to proceed with enthusiasm along the challenging path of providing the technological innovations required to deliver low-cost, safe energy, these professionals must feel supported by the public.

This is why the SPE Energy Education initiative is both timely and strategic. The effort was initiated by 2002 SPE President Steve Holditch in the form of the SPE Public Energy Education Committee (PEEC). One of PEEC’s major efforts was creation of the Energy Education pages on SPE.org, which include an Energy Education Slide Library that SPE members can use in presentations to students or the public. The work begun by PEEC is being continued as a comprehensive Energy Education Program through a global network of Regional Coordinators.