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The engineer
Sharon McCollough is a 29 year-old reservoir engineer at Total Oil Marine.
Ingredients
Method
Most
people, unless they're involved with the oil industry, can't guess what I do
and think my job is something to do with water! In fact, reservoir engineering
is a very specialised discipline of engineering. Once an oil or gas reservoir
has been discovered, it is up to the reservoir engineer to evaluate how much
oil or gas is in the reservoir and plan how to produce as much of the reserves
as possible. In most cases only 50% of the oil can be recovered from the reservoir.
I enjoyed maths and physics at school, especially the problem-solving aspects, so I chose to study engineering at university. I was still quite unsure of which career to follow and the oil industry was probably furthest from my mind. It was only after speaking to some engineers and my own careers research that I became more interested in the upstream part of the oil and gas industry, i.e. Extracting the raw materials that chemical engineers process to provide petrol, plastics, paints and medicines.
I
went on to do a specific course in petroleum engineering and I studied everything
from how oil and gas reservoirs are discovered, the methods of drilling and
completing the wells, to production technology and the main principles of reservoir
engineering. I could tell from the research being done by the university that
the industry really was at the forefront of technology, especially in the challenging
North Sea.
My first job - working as a petroleum engineer in the well operations department - was exciting and busy, with a lot of offshore work. Now I'm working as the sole reservoir engineer for a small oilfield, helping to build a computer simulation model of the field. As technology advances, more remote reservoirs are being developed and this provides lots of new technical challenges for the reservoir engineer.
