Crooked seeding?

In an event with pre-A high-school students in the ChE Department I attended today, a young speaker answered one of the questions at the end of his talk, right before lunch, of which I only grasped, approximately: "there is oil in the UK for 25 more years and in other parts of the world for 40 or 45; but the beauty of Chemical Engineering is that you can easily transfer your skills from one area to another: a fluid in a pipe is just a fluid in a pipe".

Well, I deeply disagree with both assertions. How do you feel?

The latter is not true in my experience. If you work 10 years in the oil industry, you will accumulate 10 years of experience and learnings which, obviously, someone new does not have. Indeed, it is common sense and a blessing that this must happen in this way. Otherwise, how can you compete when you are 45 with a youngster of 25, stronger and fresher, if knowledge and experience is not an issue?

And so, if you applied for jobs in the water industry, you might have 10 years of experience in oil but, you have no experience in water and, perhaps, your level is at odds with the starting salary in the new market.

I think that if you consider the employer's point of view, the second assertion is difficult to believe. It seems, anyhow, that nowadays a bunch of young British engineers decide to go "to the City", i.e. to the finance world in London. The salaries are obscene. These young students and their advisers might get the illusion that the fact is explained by the transference of good analytical and numerical skills. However, I think that the reasons behind are to be found elsewhere, most likely are due to any coyuntural situation or specifics to the employer.

Could it be?

The first assertion of oil resources doomed and depleted right in a few years is seductive and logical, but I don't believe it. I don't have major arguments, I know nothing about it: I just don't believe it. I am not sure, anyhow, because I don't understand how people involved with oil companies can maintain such a thing if it is clearly not true. Perhaps, the matter is subtle.

My point is: if the UK were about to become out of oil in 25 years, would it not be people making money out of it a little worried? Would they not do more investments in other sources?

The statement is, in addition, misleading: what do you mean by UK resources? Oil is extracted from fields around the globe. Are those geographically "closed" to the UK coast or on UK soil the ones called UK resources? Or has it to do with the nature of the company exploiting them? But then, I guess the nature of BP is quite different from that of companies operating -and belonging- to a dictatorship somewhere in the Middle East... Or Chavez's PDVSA.

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