NEW PRESIDENT OF SPE SEES PLENTY OF CHALLENGES AS WELL AS OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE 1990S

Keith Rappold
Drilling Editor

Flexibility and versatility will be the keys to opportunity for petroleum engineers in the 1990s.

Jacques Bosio, 1993 president of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, believes demand for petroleum engineers will increase during the next few years. With continued decline in the U.S. oil industry and disappearance of political walls worldwide, international assignments will offer brilliant futures for petroleum engineers.

Bosio, a native of France, is the first non-U.S. resident elected president of SPE, yet he views his nationality as minor with respect to his role.

"I am first an oil man and then a European," Bosio told Oil & Gas Journal last month during SPE's annual technical conference and exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Bosio also is vice-president of technical cooperation for exploration and production for Elf Aquitaine Production in Paris. He also has been deputy research and development director since 1979.

"Although I am the first non-U.S. resident to serve as SPE president, that should not be viewed as significant," Bosio said.

"First, I am a member of SPE. I see my presidency as just another point in the continuation of SPE as an international organization. It serves its members worldwide and in every oil and gas producing province on the globe."

Bosio replaces 1992 SPE Pres. Roger L. Abel, Conoco Inc. vice-president and general manager of exploration and production in Russia. Abel will now chair SPE's U.S. council.

BOSIO'S AGENDA

Bosio vows to emphasize these points for the coming year:

As an organization focused worldwide, SPE must magnify the U.S. scene. About 60% of its members live in the U.S., but the players are changing. SPE must tailor its programs to the companies and their professionals who will continue to be active in the U.S. industry. SPE must filter technology to these companies in a form compatible with their operating needs.
SPE must understand that technology exchange is increasingly and inevitably two way. The Commonwealth of Independent States is an excellent example. Technology and strategies from the West will help Russian engineers and scientists develop their resources. However, the Russians have developed some interesting technology as well-drilling with downhole electric motors and the electronic transmission of measurement while drilling data. SPE can help collect and disseminate this information to other parts of the world.
Cooperate to compete will be a necessary theme because no company can afford to operate in a vacuum as many have done in the past. SPE will work increasingly with geologists and geophysicists in developing programs. Many companies have adopted this interdisciplinary approach to operatio ns, and SPE must follow suit.

Bosio views 1993 as an era of partnering. Petroleum companies, regardless of the size, must cooperate as partners in operating and research projects. Companies cannot operate as islands. Likewise, SPE must begin to combine its efforts with those of national organizations, industry groups, and especially governments.

OUTLOOK

For decades, most petroleum technology came from the U.S., but this is no longer the case. In the future, the center of the oil business may no longer rest in the U.S. but in some other country. "However," Bosio said, "we cannot continue to do business without using Americans."

Although the U.S. imports about 50% of its oil, from a positive perspective it still produces almost 50%. This U.S. production level requires a large amount of skill and significant technology to develop fields as they mature.

Bosio predicts a shift in U.S. petroleum industry demographics. Majors will produce oil mainly overseas, and smaller companies will produce oil in the U.S. Majors, however, will produce a large volume of gas in the U.S.

As technology develops in other parts of the world, SPE will be the vehicle to return it to the U.S., Bosio said.

SPE also will have to serve its members where they are. SPE now has meetings all over the world, from China to Venezuela and soon in the C.I.S.

An SPE annual meeting is planned for Europe, but no date has been set. The timetable is a function of the distribution of SPE members.

About 33,000 members live in the U.S., and about 20, 000 live elsewhere. If international membership growth patterns continue, the split will be 50-50 by about 1996.

SPE will respond by opening offices where the members need them, such as its present London office.

C.I.S.

Long term opportunities in the C.I.S. are bright, but the path will be difficult. There are many opportunities in the C.I.S. for smaller companies, not just for majors and national oil companies.

"Smaller companies need to be more aggressive and take risks," Bosio said. "Taking risks is the tradition of the industry, and where risks are taken, companies succeed.

"The oil industry has no frontiers except geological ones provided by Mother Nature."

SPE can reduce risks by transferring experience others have gained from working abroad. SPE can play a large part in the C.I.S. by transferring technology from the West to the C.I.S. and back.

The C.I.S. has many good scientists and highly educated people that can be used as resources. The C.I.S. is the No. 1 oil producer in the world. "The people there have been doing something right during the past 70 years," Bosio said.

"In the C.I.S., some technology exists that does not in the West. For example, C.I.S. drilling operations use downhole electric motors. Many engineers in the West thought this technology was not possible, but the Russians did not know it could not be done."

SPE has installed two sections in the C.I.S., one in Moscow and one in Kiev. Other sections are planned for Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Siberia.

Bosio points out one difficulty for C.I.S. sections: How do people become members?

The ruble exchange rate is a problem. Also, C.I.S. engineers are not paid very well. So SPE membership dues are high relative to their salaries.

One solution is for large western companies to sponsor membership for C.I.S. petroleum engineers. Sponsoring engineers and exposing them to the SPE organization holds benefits for East and West by encouraging the exchange of ideas and technology.

CHALLENGES

Bosio believes some of the largest problems facing the oil industry involve communications, language barriers, and logistics-not technical challenges.

"Any technical problem can be overcome through research and dedicated hard work," he said.

Advances in 3-D seismic and deepwater drilling and production technologies are achievements thought impossible a few decades ago. Those technologies are now applied quite well throughout the world.

"Logistics and communications are not so easy," Bosio said. "If an engineer is dropped in the middle of nowhere in Siberia, he must use his head. He cannot just pick up the phone and call his favorite service company."

One of the biggest challenges is to keep costs within economic limits, especially in the C.I.S. where logistics, housing, language, and communication are problems.

"When the North Sea was first developed, a common joke was to take a North Sea development budget and multiply it by pi to calculate the final cost. The same may hold true for certain unknown areas in the C.I.S. The challenge will be to draw up economical budgets in areas where logistical difficulties are not mastered."

Technical problems will be overcome with time and advances in computer technology. The pace of exploration and development will follow development of computers.

The industry has made tremendous gains in its ability to find hydrocarbons mainly because of computer and 3-D seismic technology.

Automated production systems, such as subsea completions and unmanned platforms, will play a greater role in the petroleum industry during the next decade, Bosio predicts.

One key ingredient to technological progress is continued research and development. Major oil companies need to continue their long term research programs to avoid problems they won't be able to solve.

PETROLEUM ENGINEERS

Although there is an abundance of petroleum engineers now, that will change soon. Bosio believes relatively stable oil prices will lead to an increase in demand for petroleum and hence petroleum engineers.

Bosio said one of the problems created by the industry's bad public image is that many students do not wish to study petroleum engineering. The best and brightest students pursue other disciplines. The number of students in petroleum engineering in large universities has decreased.

Bosio suggests that students now entering college should strongly consider petroleum engineering. The industry is at the bottom, and by the time these students graduate, industry should have turned around, offering tremendous career opportunities.

Petroleum engineers probably will not spend their entire working lives with a single company. To compete in the international oil industry, engineers need versatility because many may change specialties, companies, and countries during their careers.

"Petroleum engineering graduates should be prepared for flexibility and learn at least one foreign language," Bosio said. Companies expect flexibility and versatility in their new hires. "Engineers must learn to be multidisciplinary. A drilling engineer today may be a reservoir engineer tomorrow."

The employment prospects for engineers who lost jobs in recent years should improve as oil demand increases. Such engineers should become flexible and adaptable, perhaps changing specialties. Layoffs have hurt the industry because many of those people have valuable skills that will not be used again in the oil field.

SPE is trying to help: In the U.S., it recently started a program for career guidance. Throughout the U.S., 4 hr conferences will teach engineers how to write a resume, adapt to problems, and become more flexible.

SPE'S ROLE

SPE faces a demand to increase the number of papers it publishes.

Bosio said its peer review process is slow-but important. The society, however, cannot afford to publish all its papers. It is therefore investigating the possibility of compiling all nonpublished papers into a book for sale to the members. Some of the best papers will continue to be published in SPE journals.

SPE's Journal of Petroleum Technology must change by addressing the needs of members in the U.S. whose problems are not the same as before. SPE's journals must follow the needs of the membership, including independent producers who operate a large portion of U.S. production.

Those operators will want more practical solutions to improve day to day operations economically. Many believe the journals' research papers are fine but do not solve their immediate problems, Bosio said. Those operators want papers that tell them how to work over their wells and make them more productive today.

One solution to the problem is CD-ROM (compact disk-read only memory) technology to catalog more than 20,000 SPE technical papers from the past 2 decades. With this system, a member can quickly search for all papers covering a particular topic.

One of the more difficult tasks Bosio sees for the near term concerns the oil industry's image. He believes SPE must continually work harder to establish better dialogue with the public to give the industry a positive image.

SPE has developed a program to distribute a "magic box" to its sections so members can demonstrate the nuts and bolts of the oil industry to the public. The program has been well received in high schools and civic clubs.

SPE also needs to encourage rational debates with environmental groups. The goal is intelligent cooperation-not bickering.

BACKGROUND

Bosio knows what it takes to become a successful oilman. He cites his career path as evidence that any engineer can advance in a company, if the engineer remains flexible about assignments and puts in more than an 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. work day.

He graduated from Ecole Centrale in Paris in 1957 with an M.S. in mechanical engineering and studied reservoir engineering at the University of Texas in 1957-58 on a Rotary International graduate fellowship. He then began his career in the oil industry as an evaluation consultant in Colorado.

He joined Elf Aquitaine Production in 1963. He has worked in locales ranging from the Sahara Desert to Offshore Gabon and Congo. His specialties have included drilling, reservoir engineering, offshore construction, and enhanced oil recovery.

Bosio also played a major role in Elf's pioneering development of horizontal drilling. He was project manager of the Elf/Institute Francais du Petrole horizontal drilling joint venture in Rospo Mare field in the Adriatic Sea in 1982. It was the first field developed exclusively with horizontal wells.