What do mechanical engineers do in oil and gas companies?
I did my undergrad in mechanical engineering, but I work as a petroleum engineer. Right now I'm on the production side, which means I'm in charge of a bunch of wells and I have to make sure they are always producing optimally, when things break I do failure analysis, redesign them and get them fixed, and I manage the rigs that do the fixing. I'll probably end up doing some time in each of the different petroleum engineering disciplines, reservoir, drilling, completions, production, and facilities. Right now some of my duties overlap completions and facilities. There are many facets of each discipline that require some mechanical engineering knowledge.More traditional mechanical engineering, working for an operator (company that actually does the exploration and production), would be integrity engineering (fixing stuff that fails and redesigning it, like pipelines, buildings, facilities, etc). Mechanical engineers that work for service companies (the companies that the operators hire to provide the tools and carry out the feild work), would design different tools and machines, or work in optimizing the manufacturing process.
What is the best option for a Mechanical Engineer after a Bachelor’s in Engineering?
There are so many things you can do.But I will tell you first what not to do?Don’t do any higher education in India going for M.E/M.Tech or MBA, in India. If you want to take up a job in Industry your post graduation is almost useless 99%. You will regret this after 10 years of experience or more, which I am doing now. As far industry the number of years and the content of your experience and your achievements matter. 5 years down the line after you start work no recruiter will ever enter the educational area of your resume. It all matters only to entry into industry for the chance of campus interview whether you study in IIT or IIM and whether you are graduate/post-graduate. Later no one looks at it.If you are really interested interested in research then take GATE exam and get into premier institutes like IIT / NIT’s and sure pursue your PhD. Then you have to be clear that you are gonna start your career very late from rest of your friends. But MBA is a useless thing to do after engineering. It is a fashionable thing started few years back. But it is a baseless thing to do a technical under graduation and move onto a management career unless you found clearly engineering is not my thing and want to shift your career path from hardcore engineering.What to do?Instead of planning for a job plan for a career. To be very broad no matter what engineering you did two things are gonna rule the world from now.Energy - Alternative fuel sources, Electric carsWater - Water treatment, water structuresThis is gonna change the whole industrial world. Big oil companies are gonna lose their infrastructure and investments overnight which the oil barons are resisting and hiding to figure out how to save their ass.
Can a mechanical engineer work as a petroleum engineer?
I did my undergrad in Mechanical engineering, and was hired as a petroleum engineer upon graduation. I still work as a petroleum engineer today. I also have multiple petroleum engineer colleagues that graduated in mechanical engineering. My brother, who is currently studying mechanical engineering, just finished his 3rd petroleum engineering internship. So the answer is, yes, you can work as a petroleum engineer with a mechanical engineering degree.The oil and gas industry tends to give more weight to work experience than formal education. In my case, I worked a couple summers in the oil feild, which lead to a petroleum engineering internship, then a full time job. No one really cared that I didn't study petroleum engineering. All they saw was that I was studying some type of engineering and that I had I bunch of work experience in the oil field. That included companies like Shell, Exxon, and BP. I even beat out kids from top petroleum engineering programs. I got my foot in the door with my field experience, then I just had to interview better than they did. To tell you the truth, my formation as a mechanical engineer has helped me immensely in my career. Oil feild operations are all about pumps, pipelines, tubing, fluid flow, and pressures. Right up my alley. All you need to know for the rest is that fluid flows from high pressure to low pressure, how to calculate hydraulic head, and PV=nRT.My advice to you, if you really want a career as a petroleum engineer, is to find some type of summer work in the oil field and work your way up from there.