Here’s a chance to meet the future – in this case, the future of working in oil and gas or being a part of tomorrow’s energy industry.
Work teams are evolving to include professional newcomers, new technical skills, new combinations of expertise and perspective. The next generation of industry workgroups might be substantially different from those of today.
What those future workgroups will look like is part of several sessions at the upcoming International Meeting for Applied Geoscience and Energy in Houston at the end of this month.
Four of IMAGE’s strategic panel sessions touch on the topic.
Andrea Reynolds helped organize the Aug. 29 morning session “Revitalizing the Energy Workforce Post-Pandemic and Across Generations,” with Judy Schulenberg and Mohit Khanna.
Reynolds works in exploration for Shell and is past-president of AAPG’S Division of Professional Affairs. Because of the COVID pandemic, she said, “some people have started their careers working from home. Others like the flexibility. Are they getting the same background and training and support that others of us got? And does that matter?”
The discussion “is open to all AAPG members and would be for students, early careers, late careers, even on from that to consulting and mentoring. We all face pivots. I don’t know many of us who’ve followed a linear career path,” Reynolds said.
“No one manages your career other than you. I’d hope people coming to this session would learn from the panelists how careers can take different pathways,” she added.
Panel members for the session include Julian Chenin, geophysical data scientist for Houston-based Bluware Inc. Chenin serves as global chair for AAPG’s Young Professionals group and co-chair of the AAPG Sustainable Development Committee
“We’re seeing an evolution in the energy landscape. We’re seeing an evolution in skills as well. I see geoscience in general becoming even more interdisciplinary,” Chenin said.
Cooperation with other energy experts can produce a combination of skill sets and knowledge that leads to more productivity and a better understanding of what’s essential to a project, he observed.
“Communication is going to be critical, so just having some understanding of other disciplines – and it can be basic – will be crucial,” he noted.
Other panel members are:
- Rhonda Welch, subsurface talent manager for Chevron, who coaches STEM students at her local middle school in Houston
- Allison Barbato, a doctoral candidate at Louisiana State University, whose focus is source rock geochemistry and biostratigraphy. Barbato will begin working with Hess in Houston this fall.
- Cindy Yeilding, who’s been named an AAPG Legend in Exploration. A long-time association leader and expert in offshore exploration, Yeilding retired as a senior vice president of BP America in 2021.
Bridging the Generational Gap
With supercomputing a daily tool in oil and gas and advanced artificial intelligence on the horizon, the effects of future technology and computer applications will have a major impact on tomorrow’s work teams.
After Apple introduced its first iPhone in 2007, smart phones quickly became ubiquitous. Now the oil and gas industry sees new hires who grew up with smart phones and computer tablets and who experienced the pandemic in their formative years.
Energy companies might not know what to expect from this new generation. But they are about to find out.
Judy Schulenberg is a member of the AAPG House of Delegates and owner of geo-consulting firm Explorer Group 1 in Houston. She noted that technological transitions haven’t always been easy for the industry.
“What I’ve noticed is that our geoscientists tend to fall into roughly three groups depending on when they entered industry. There was a definite line of demarcation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which marked the entrance of individual or desktop computing,” Schulenberg said.
“When desktop computers came along, a lot of old timers used to ‘slipping’ logs or making maps from paper seismic sections were fearful. They didn’t really trust these machines,” she recalled.
Co-mentoring helped the industry bridge the gap, Schulenberg said, with experienced geoscientists “showing what maps and logs truly had to tell us” and younger professionals leading the way in computing.
“Now we have those (graduates) coming in who, unless they had a more traditional professor, have never made a paper map, have never drawn from a list of data points or matched up logs on a tabletop. They want the computer and the speed,” she said.
“They are eager and want to move up quickly in the company and expect to do great things. And they will. But what the industry has done with each cycle of the economy is to lay off or force retirement of the experienced, which often causes a repeat of the learning curve,” she noted.
Integration and Consolidation
Other IMAGE ’23 sessions will consider the composition and direction of future workgroups, including the Aug. 29 afternoon panel discussion “Powering the Energy Landscape of Tomorrow: Successful Geoscience Collaboration with Diverse Teams.”
Reynolds reiterated the importance of interdisciplinary understanding and cooperation to the future energy industry.
“I think workgroups will be more consolidated. In unconventional resources, we’re working so much more with landmen, working with the folks in midstream. We are going to be working with the whole business,” she noted.
With a new relationship to technology coming into the industry, “perhaps there will be a different wave of training on how we do things. Is there anything that will be lost in moving to new technologies in the future? I don’t know,” she said.
Chenin said, “I think we’re going to have a more comprehensive approach in the future. As of late, we’ve had this increasingly unified voice, and it is how to solve the energy dilemma.”
That’s really a double dilemma of delivering more energy to meet the world’s needs while addressing climate change and the energy transition, Chenin agreed.
“What I want to do is to make a difference. I like computers and I do love rocks, so how do we put those together to advance the industry?” he said.
“I would say to those increasing their skill sets, really it all should come down to ‘Find what you love,’” he added.
Chenin is early in his career: “I still remember floppy disks, even though I never used one,” he said. Like many young energy professionals, he has considered switching to a different industry. But he enjoys the essential nature of his current work.
“From better access to health care to the clothes we wear, it’s all built around energy. I do feel a lot of passion for this industry,” he said.
In transitioning to the future, “I think it’s incredibly important to remember the roots,” Chenin said.
Schulenberg has high hopes for young professionals and their knowledge but worries about the amount of experience that has left the industry in recent years.
“In my consulting business, I’ve seen what this lack of experience can do when you can only find a drilling company with Permian experience but you need to drill a well in the Gulf Coast. There needs to be a blending of experience and the new ideas and enthusiasm that different generational groups provide,” she observed.
“We each bring skills to the table, and learning how to maximize our technology and developing a working asset team will bring advantages to everyone, but especially to the industry,” Schulenberg said.
“We need to learn from each other, mentor each other, and recognize that everyone has something to offer.”