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Spotlight on Alumni
Erik Oswald, PhD '91
Middle East Area Manager
ExxonMobil Exploration Company
By Toby Speed, Office of Communications
As a spokesman for ExxonMobil through the company's television commercials, Erik Oswald has become a familiar face to many viewers. Originally from the Seattle area, Erik earned a BS from the University of Washington, followed by a PhD in earth sciences from Stony Brook. After earning his degree, Erik went to work in what was then Exxon's research lab in Houston and has been with the company in a variety of roles ever since. We talked to him about his Stony Brook connection, his career path at ExxonMobil, and his perspective on the role of "Big Oil" in today's energy-conscious climate.
Stony Brook: You're from the west coast. How did you choose Stony Brook for your graduate work?
Erik Oswald: When I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, there was a graduate student there who'd been a Stony Brook undergraduate, and he was the one who first mentioned Stony Brook to me. I made inquiries, and Bill Meyers, who was then a professor in the department of Earth and Space Sciences, flew me out for a visit and did a great job of showing me the area. He was the one who was instrumental in convincing me to come out there. The University offered great support, so it was the best of all the deals that I looked at.
SB: What was your dream or goal when you began your graduate study? Did you start out in a different direction than the one that led you to where you are today?
EO: I was probably completely sure that I would never work in the oil industry and certainly never live in Houston, Texas. I don't know that I had a direct vision, but I was leaning much more toward a career as an academic, living somewhere in the northern United States. But I did a really fun degree working mostly in Majorca, Spain, on some rocks that were exposed on the sea cliffs of that island, so I tried to take as long as possible to do my PhD During that time I had the opportunity to come down for a summer and work at what was then Exxon's research laboratory in Houston, and that was my first introduction to the oil and gas business. It was a fantastic experience. I spent the summer out in the western U.S. doing fieldwork with some amazing geologists. It was very intriguing because the caliber of people at the research lab was just extraordinary, and it was like being in a very well funded university environment.
After that summer I was pretty convinced that that was what I wanted to do, so I finished my degree, got an offer from them, and came down and started working there.
SB: Who at Stony Brook most influenced you in your development as a researcher? Do you remain in contact with any faculty or former fellow students?
EO: I had some great faculty mentors and they all were all strongly influential in different ways. Bill Meyers was an outstanding field geologist and great at teaching the basics of observational science. Another guy who's still there and who really influenced my thinking was Gil Hanson. He helped me analyze problems and taught me how to keep a very open mind when looking at anything. The department also included Martin Schoonen and Rich Reeder, both great thinkers, very careful and open-minded scientists who are not out to prove a preconceived idea. Those are skills that serve you well when you get into any other environment, especially the business environment.
I do stay in contact with them and with some former classmates. I have lifelong friends that I made during my graduate school years.
SB: Tell me about your career path. In what roles at ExxonMobil have you been involved in research and exploration?
EO: My first four or five years were as a researcher, which is equivalent to being a college professor. You teach classes in the field to the company's geoscientists, and you do research on a variety of topics. I became very involved in the geology of the Middle East, because a lot of our projects were in that part of the world. Also, some of the best examples of the geology I was most interested in studying were in the Middle East.
I gradually transitioned into the business part of the company and for a while worked as a geologist in the Exploration Company, applying geology to business. After that I went into managerial projects, and when you do that you do many different kinds of geology-I looked at the Caspian and Africa and Texas and all kinds of strange places. One of the great things about working here is that you work the geology of the world. Even if you live in the same city all the time, the work that you're doing is around the globe.
I was involved a little bit in planning, which is more the administration and strategy side of the business, and then I went back to being the manager of the subsurface part of the research lab-the division I actually started in-guiding about a hundred geoscientists and engineers in doing research in the subsurface around reservoirs. Now I'm the Middle East Area Manager, so I look after all of the new business that we're trying to generate in that region.
SB: You're exploring new sites there?
EO: Yes. Sometimes we're looking for opportunities to find new deposits of oil and gas. Other times we're trying to bring technology and expertise that we have to help those countries develop oil and gas resources they've already discovered. A lot of the oil and gas fields in the Middle East are getting old now, so it takes more and more ingenuity and technology to get all of the oil and gas out of them. We cooperate with them and form joint ventures to help them to get more value out of the resources they have.
There's a real theme in all of this, and that is that ExxonMobil is a very technical company. All of the managers and the people who run the company are scientists and engineers. It's an exciting place that way. It's very driven scientifically, and you never really leave geology. Even though I'm a manager now, I still get to work geology things every day and talk to people about geology every day. That's the fun part of the job.
SB: I read the section on ExxonMobil's Web site that addresses the risks of climate change and the challenge of developing technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Can you give me an example, in the work you're currently doing, that illustrates how ExxonMobil is facing the challenge of global warming while trying to meet the energy demands of society?
EO: Here's a good example. There's been a huge economic boom in the Middle East, enormous growth in their industry, and they're building factories and aluminum smelters. Associated with this economic boom they're generating a huge amount of CO2, because when you build a smelter or a power plant a lot of CO2 is generated, which is obviously something we're trying to mitigate. We want to do everything we can to reduce the amount of CO2 that goes in the atmosphere.
We're working now with a country in the Middle East on a system in which they capture all of the CO2 that's coming out of these factories and power plants, put it into pipes, and then we help them find ways to put that CO2 back under ground. We actually push that CO2 down into oil reservoirs, and this helps them [release?] the oil more efficiently and effectively. So they get two benefits: more efficient release of oil and the assurance that the CO2, rather than going up into the atmosphere, is now stored below the earth. This process is called CCS-Carbon Capture and Storage. To all the folks who are meeting about climate change now, this is one of the really effective technologies that we have. It's actually been done for years and years and is a proven technology, but it hasn't been applied in a big way. And that's what we're working on, the large-scale implementation of CSS.
SB: "Big Oil" has developed something of a negative reputation, especially when crude oil prices were over $100/barrel last year and the popular media was highlighting large profits. What's your perspective on this?
EO: There's a common belief that somehow the big oil companies like ExxonMobil control the price of oil their benefit. Usually this comes from people who don't have a very good sense of what the global oil and gas picture actually looks like. The easiest way to think about it is that right now the world uses around 80 million barrels a day. There's a lot of oil being produced all over the place. I think probably the largest producer is Saudi Arabia, and they produce maybe 10, 11, 12 million barrels a day. We produce maybe two or two and a half million barrels a day. So out of that 80, ExxonMobil is at about two, two and a half, and we're the largest international oil company in the world in terms of production. You can see from those numbers that it would be impossible for us with such small amounts of production to actually control the price. The big producers are the big OPEC countries such as Russia and Venezuela. So even if we wanted to, and we wouldn't want to, there's no way we could. We're really a relatively a small piece of the overall oil picture.
The price of oil is actually created the same way the price of a stock is created. There's a big, huge global market. Traders go out and purchase oil on an open market, and if they feel it's going to be hard for them to find oil in the future, then the prices start to go up. Just like with stocks. It's not always logical or reasonable. Sometimes stocks go way higher than they should, and sometimes they fall way lower. But on average they tend to find the market price.
The way we run our company is we pretty much always plan for low-price environments. That way, when the prices come back down, like they are now, we know that all our investments are good, we can keep everybody working, and we don't have to have layoffs. There are other companies that bet on prices being high, and then when prices fall they have to fire people. You're seeing a lot of that right now as prices come down. We don't have any way of controlling the price. We're kind of a conservative company. It's an enormous business and when the prices go up we do make a lot of money. We also have to invest a huge amount of money to run the business, and people don't realize how big the investments are. We spend 20-25 billion dollars a year investing in oil production.
The project I mentioned earlier, to help put the CO2 back into the ground in the Middle East, will probably cost several billion to even 10 billion dollars, and it will take ten to 20 years to implement it, a very long time. A lot of times you may spend a bunch of money up front-billions and billions of dollars-and you don't actually see a return until that site has been producing, sometimes for decades. So when you take on these projects, what you hope is that none of the rules change. You want the laws and the tax regimes to stay constant.
SB: You are now becoming a public face for ExxonMobil through their TV commercials. How has being a TV star affected your job and your life?
EO: Well, it's sort of funny, because we don't really watch much TV in my house. The only TV I end up watching is movies with my little girl, Finding Nemo and things like that. So I haven't really seen them very much. Occasionally I'll see the ads at an airport when I'm passing through.
SB: People don't stop you and say, hey, you're the guy in that commercial?
EO: Yeah, I've had that happen a little bit. I think the most amazing thing to me about it is that I have gotten lots of comments and strangers contacting me, but it has all been remarkably positive. I guess I would have thought, given ExxonMobil's reputation, that there would have been a few more negative comments, but overall, I've actually had only one call out of hundreds that was negative, and it was clear it was somebody who just didn't like ExxonMobil or any big oil company. The most fun thing about it is that I've had lots of calls from friends I hadn't seen in ages, all the way back to junior high school. It was also fun to watch my little girl watch it on TV. The first time she saw it she was kind of excited.
SB: Historically, jobs in the oil industry have been strongly tied to the price of oil. With the recent drop in oil prices, do you expect that job growth will be affected?
EO: I think in general the energy industry is a fantastic place for anybody with a science or engineering background to get into, and the reason is that the demographics of the industry are really unusual. Half the people who work in my company now are going to retire within the next five or six years, so there's an enormous opportunity for people to come in and at a very young age find themselves with lots of responsibility and a really exciting career. That was created because during the last bust in 1986, when the oil prices completely collapsed, none of the oil companies hired for quite a long time, five or six years, so a hole was created in their demographics, and you'll find there are not very many people between the ages of 35 and 45 in the industry now. You can come in and at a very young age be doing a lot of exciting things, because people are needed to run the industry.
SB: What advice would you give to graduate students in the geosciences today?
EO: Get the right kind of training and hone your skills to be an objective, independent-thinking scientist. Avoid the easy traps of going out to prove an existing theory or a popular idea or a pile-more-data-on-a-bandwagon kind of idea. Really hone your skills at being able to independently question and test ideas. That kind of critical and analytical thinking is going to serve you far better in the real world than your ability to support someone else's idea. Stay true to being an independent thinker.
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