Paleontology In The Oil Field

[Cole]

My uncle came home for the holidays from Malaysia, where he works 3/4 of the year as an engineer for Exxon, predicting the oil flow beneath the surface. He has been working for Exxon for over 20 years, and recently encouraged me to go back to college and study paleontology and work there with him at Exxon. Is anyone here involved in this line of work, that can possibly explain what that type of career field would entail? Are there any specialized courses beyond the obvious that I would need to take?

Thanks, and Happy New Year!

Cole~

Edited January 1, 2011 by Cole

[bear-dog]

Dont know how much help this is since I havent been in contact with him for a couple of years.Try contacting Chris Finch at Hillsborough Community College,Ybor City Campus.

He had that job until he quit to teach due to the politics of the business.

[MarkGelbart]

I believe you would have to get a degree in Geology. Google your closest university and look up the geology curricula.

Don't count on being able to collect fossils on the job.

I heard that people working at Plant Vogtle in Georgia were specifically told not to collect fossils on the job or they'd get fired. Plant Vogtle is on land that has a lot of Eocene fossils, but the companies that run these operations don't want you taking up their precious time hunting around for fossils.

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[jkfoam]

Paleontologist that work in the oil field at oil drilling sites are known in the vernacular as "Bug Men or as The Bug Guy". They spend their time examining the drilling debris from the well core for microfossils, primarily foraminifera and ostracods because they are stratgraphic markers that tell them what geologic formation they are currently drilling in. This is critical information. The oil company knows what oil bearing formation they want to drill into. If they drill into that formation and no oil is found they have a "Dry hole" and there is no reason to drill any further. Drilling time is very expensive. It is the Bug man that tells them when they have reached that point.

Back in the day 90 % of paleontologist were Bug Men, 5% were professors, and 5% worked in museums. I don't know what the break down is today.

Forams and ostracods were so important to the Bug Men because their small size allowed them to be recovered from the drilling debris intact where larger fossils would be ground to pieces and unidentifiable.

JKFoam

[ncjack99]

I work for one of the companies that support Plant Vogtle however I do not work at the site. They do frown upon looking for fossils at the site. The main reason is safety. I am hoping one day to visit the area and maybe get to hunt the land not connected to the plant during my off time.

[Boesse]

My 2 cents here: oil companies aren't hiring many (if any at all) micropaleontologists these days. Economic paleontologists never even work on mollusks: they work on foraminifera, diatoms, etc. Micropalaeontology has been a dying field for decades, and used to be the major method of rock correlation for petroleum exploration. Now, with the advent of sequence stratigraphy, and 3D seismic data, micropaleontology is rather obsolete. Sure, I could get hired at exxon in a heartbeat - and so could any paleontologist - but neither of us would be doing paleontology. We'd be analyzing well log and seismic data.

[tracer]

i agree with boesse and had been trying to figure out how to express my reservations regarding the future of that employment. someone very much in the know told me essentially the same thing fairly recent, and also indicated that his company only hires geophysicists with post-baccalaureate degrees.

[Cole]

As always, when I have questions you kind people have answers. Thank you very much for the detailed replies. It doesnt seem like something I want to be involved in after seeing what you have written. The type of work they are doing seems to take the fun right out of paleontology. Micro fossils are definately interesting, but not interesting enough to make it a career.

My father works for the DOT and the paleontologists they employ seem to have a lot more fun on the job, and find all kinds of neat stuff. Do paleontologists called out by the department of transportation usually sample areas where new roads will go to try and locate any possible signifigant finds...before they are destroyed by bulldozers? Or is there some other purpose for them? Are they allowed to keep specimens, or are they property of the state?

Cole~

[Boesse]

Not true, in my view. You'd be practicing pragmatic paleontology (not just theoretical, academic paleontology, which also has its worthwhile place, obviously) and getting paid the big bucks to do so, to boot.

You completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. The oil companies aren't hiring micropaleontologists these days. I know many paleontologists who have gone to work there - but they're being employed as stratigraphers, analyzing seismic, well log, and 3D seismic data. Sure, there are a few micropaleontologists left at some oil companies, but micropaleontology has been left behind for more powerful stratigraphic methods of correlation such as sequence stratigraphy.

I'll put it this way: I go to the second largest geology department in the U.S., and one of the major hotbeds for recruiting master's students into petrololeum jobs. In the hundreds of job postings I've seen in the last few years, they've all been for geologist positions, analyzing well log and seismic data. I haven't seen a single economic paleontologist position being advertised in the last 5-6 years. And we're talking Exxon, Marathon, Conoco Phillips, Whiting, to name a few.

So what I meant was - anyone else here or myself for that matter - if we went to work for an oil company, we wouldn't be doing paleontology. We'd be doing sequence stratigraphy and seismic stratigraphy. Not even micropaleontology.

Bobby