Petrophysicist
Learn more about me and why I joined ConocoPhillips:
I graduated in 2005 with a Masters in chemistry from the University of Bristol. Having little previous knowledge of the oil industry, I went to work as a wireline field engineer in Northern Canada for two years. This gave me a good grounding to life and work in the field. From there I worked for a consultancy in Stavanger, Norway before joining ConocoPhillips in January 2010 as a petrophysicist. My previous jobs were both working for oil field service companies, which is quite a different experience to working for an operator. Here you make the decisions for what sort of data you want and why you want it, whilst ensuring what you get from the service company is of the highest standard. I find ConocoPhillips a very personable company with a lively working environment, a great team spirit and effective collaboration. Back to top
I joined ConocoPhillips as a petrophysicist in the technical services department. Technical services are a group of specialised disciplines who are loaned out to the assets as required to provide their specialist technical support. I have worked on a wide range of projects, from providing petrophysical models which are inputs into geological and reservoir simulation models, to well planning and live well petrophysical support to our operated exploration and development wells. Often I attend meetings to present the interpretation work I have carried out. These might be presentations to higher level management or else defending your technical work to partners.
ConocoPhillips (U.K.) Limited has a large variety of fields and plays in their portfolio and this means that projects are all very different whether you are working on the Central Graben high pressure/high temperature (HP/HT) play, or the southern North Sea dry gas or fractured chalk – each project has very different challenges.
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Joining ConocoPhillips with four years previous industry experience meant that I did not go through the graduate training scheme. However, I have been able to attend a range of external and internal technical courses, which my manager and I chose specifically to focus on key areas for my professional development. ConocoPhillips is keen to provide employees with soft skill training courses such as how to give and seek feedback or making effective presentations, as well as the pure technical training programmes.
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For the short-term, I plan to continue working within the UK. As already mentioned, there is a lot of scope to work on different projects and lots to learn. In the long-term, I would like to take what I have learned and build upon this by working on other projects overseas. As well as building experience by working on new projects, there will be learnings from the UK that I would like to apply to other business areas, as this builds and creates a strong sense of knowledge sharing within the company..
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