Reliability vs Maintenance vs Integrity vs Facility Engineer for Oil Producers

[billbusy]

I have worked as an mechanical engineer at an EPC company for oil & gas industry in Calgary for 4 years.

Recently I want to accumulate more direct experience with rotating equipment from the field.

I found related to mechanical engineering, there are several different positions on oil producer field: Reliability vs Maintenance vs Integrity vs Facility Engineer

The job description are not very clear for me to distinguish these positions.

Can anyone tell me the differences among these positions, especially for a mechanical engineering background?

Thank you.

MSc. Mechanical Engineering;
5 years EPC experience;
Oil & Gas industry in Canada.

 

[zdas04]

Facility Engineer might have operational responsibilities (it depends on the company, many companies treat "Facilities Engineers" as "Project Engineers" and they are pretty worthless). The others are all pure overhead and could all vanish back in to the ooze from which they slid 15 years ago without anyone noticing (except that their project costs will go down, integrity will improve, and reliability will increase).

If that is your list and you want to learn how Oil & Gas works, go for Facilities Engineer and do everything you can do to get hooked into a single asset and learn how it works and what it needs. Anything else and you might as well never leave a plant fence.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[KernOily]

I've done them all so here's my experience.

As a Facility engineer for an oil producer you will be doing capital and expense projects and operations support. Usually Very little rotating equipment troubleshooting. Any equipment engineering is farmed out to EPC contractors. Usually.

As a Reliability and maintenance engineer your time will be spent analyzing failures of both static and rotating equipment, work order histories, spare parts policies, Pareto-ing maintenance expenditures, pulling reports from the CMMS, and training operations and maintenance crafts on reliability improvement strategies. If you are a people person this is a god job for you. I hated it. There was very little time in the field looking at busted bearings and failed seals, for example.

The best place to get full-on rotating equipment experience is in a refinery or chemical plant where they have a dedicated rotating equipment group. E&P doesn't have that at the field level. Not enough installed horsepower to warrant a special position. If you want to stay in E&P and do rotating equipment you will have to go overseas and work offshore or possibly to the Gulf, but either way you're working offshore because that's where the big pumps and compressors and turbines are. Another place is gas processing or cogen operators where you are working on turbines and compressors. Lastly, working in a vendor shop such as the big Goulds or Sulzer shops in Los Angeles would be good.

Good luck dude.

 

[ScottyUK]

You might look into power generation too. Much of the plant will be familiar-looking stuff - the feedwater pump turbine drives in a power station are much the same as the bigger machines you'll see on a refinery, and there are pumps of every kind and size. The main generators and turbines are a league apart: there's nothing in the O&G rotating world to rival the size and complexity of a utility-class turbine-generator. Your skills from O&G will transfer fairly easily to powergen, and generation has the benefit that it's an industry they haven't figured out how to offshore (yet).