President's column
The so-called “big crew change”—the retirement of a large number of experienced professionals and their replacement by a younger generation—has been widely debated during the last 10 years or so, including at many SPE conferences and in the columns of JPT. However, there is something new and very important: this big crew change has actually begun. How is the industry doing in this critical transition?
First, the companies are hiring a lot of young people. This is good news, but I am not sure we are hiring enough to meet our future needs. As I discussed in this column a couple of months ago, our future production will become more difficult and will require more efforts. More human brainpower will be definitively needed, and our industry may become slightly more staff intensive, which is a reversal from the historic trend. In addition, many of our activities will have more important technology and science components. Examples of such activities are seismic processing and interpretation, with more subtle traps and more difficult subsalt plays; EOR, with the need for advanced interface science for chemical flooding; and production operations, with difficult flow assurance issues in deepwater fields.
This means that we will need a more diverse staff—people with broad abilities who are able, for example, to manage a development project some day. This is the traditional petroleum engineer profile. But we also will need people with a focused, in-depth competence to address the type of issues I mention above, and which are relatively new in our industry.
So the new generation will be there for us to access. What about issues related to the loss of many experienced people? I remember having read a column in JPT where a very interesting observation was made: If we look at the global drilling activity in the past 20 years, we can clearly see a correlation between nonproductive time (NPT) and years of experience (average) of the drilling crews; staff with less experience makes more mistakes and loses more time. That is not a big surprise—after all, it is well known that making mistakes helps to build experience. This type of observation is reported only for drilling, because NPT is carefully measured and monitored only for drilling activities. The story no doubt is the same for all our activities, from geosciences to production operations; it just is not measured.
