Rising Oil Pinches Pockets, Signifies Boon for UA Grads in Petroleum-Based Field

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Paying nearly $3 per gallon of gas is not something Jamal Obid enjoys, but this University of Alabama student also knows the price spike plays a role in the legendary boon to bust swings of the oil industry. And that swing is headed in the best direction for those who, like Obid, are poised to graduate and enter their chosen profession…oil exploration.

Obid is scheduled to earn his doctorate in geology from UA later this month and soon thereafter expects to move to Houston to begin working in oil exploration as a geoscientist for Occidental Oil and Gas, a company for which he interned last summer.

“Luckily, I had had an internship in 2005 and based on that performance, coupled with oil prices, I had several offers from oil companies, large and mid-sized,” Obid said. The price spikes have made it more economically feasible for oil companies to invest in personnel and equipment to explore unexplored and under-explored areas, he said. “Rising oil prices gave oil companies the momentum to ‘dig deeper,’ if you will.”

Dr. Harold Stowell, professor and chair of UA’s geological sciences department, has seen oil companies’ interest level in hiring UA students rise and fall cyclically during the 20 years he’s been on campus, but he said the latest trend has some distinctions.

“Right now, we’re on a dramatic upswing,” Stowell said. “We had five to 10 years of very limited interest from the oil and gas companies. Currently, with the price of oil and gas as high as it is, and with the maturity of the industry’s geologists, there is a tremendous interest right now in hiring, and that is a world-wide phenomenon.

“My own view is we’re not only in one of our cycles, we’re also reaching a point where the resources are so limited and the number of remaining oil and gas fields is so small, we’re going to need more and more people to find smaller and smaller resources.”

The average salary for a petroleum geologist with less than two years’ experience was listed as $74,400, according to a survey in the April 2006 edition of an American Association of Petroleum Geologists publication.

The average salary for a petroleum geologist holding a Ph.D. and with less than two years’ experience was listed as $82,500.

In an article accompanying the salary survey, one industry expert characterized the industry’s search for job candidates as “near frantic.” Much of the industry’s recruitment of students is done, not on college campuses, but during industry conferences and conventions where students often give poster presentations highlighting their research, Stowell said. If companies are impressed, they might pull the student aside for a mini-interview, right on the spot. UA sponsors their students to attend such conferences.

“In the past couple of years, near 100 percent of the people we have sent have been hired,” Stowell said.

The demand is not strictly limited to petroleum geologists, the UA professor said. “The field of economic geology – which includes all sorts of mining activities, including precious metals, base metals, sand and gravel and other materials – is also booming,” Stowell said. With the expansion of international economies, such as China and India, huge volumes of copper are needed for growing electrical needs, as one example.

UA’s department of geological sciences has approximately 40 undergraduate students and another 40 graduate students, about 25 of whom are working on doctoral degrees with the remainder pursuing master’s degrees. Most of UA’s geology undergraduate students are not focused on the oil and gas industry, but rather, Stowell said, on fields such as hydrogeology, which focuses on underground water supplies.

Obid, who anticipates working with oil exploration groups stationed in parts of the Middle East as well as South America, credited his approximate half-dozen job offers to more than a “hot” career.

“It is a testimony to the quality of the education at The University of Alabama, in general, and this department, specifically. I’m glad I was at this university, and I’m glad I was at this department, and I’m extremely glad I was able to work with Dr. (Ernest) Mancini,” Obid said. Mancini is Distinguished Research Professor in UA’s department of geological sciences and director of the Center for Sedimentary Basin Studies, both in UA’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Although it has been an advantageous time to be in the job market, Obid says he’s not wishing for sustained record prices. “I’m a consumer, as well,” the UA student pointed out. “We have a fixed salary, driven by our original passion for science itself. We are scientists, and we don’t have control over prices going up and down.”

If anything, a successful scientist could have the reverse effect on prices, Obid said. “Part of what we do is to try to find oil and gas in hopes that this would probably lead to lowering the oil and gas prices at the pump.”