Where I will be Working

Hello,

Well it has been a week, and in that time what I will be researching for the coming months has been finalized.  Like I had hoped, I will be researching the refinery process of oil and natural gas.  More specifically, I will be looking into the improvements made recently to the refinery process, and what improvements there are yet to make.  In order to accomplish this task I will be doing a mixture of self research and observing engineers at the amazing company of Fluor (Fluor's Website).

My self research will be mostly looking into past improvements, but if I stumble across a current problem with refineries I won’t complain.  I will use this research to look at how this area of the industry has changed, as well as a basis of knowledge for when I am working at Fluor.

The fun part will be my time at Fluor, a downstream energy company.  For those that do not know, the downstream energy sector is basically what happens when the oil is taken out of the ground.  Fluor’s part in the industry is to construct and maintain energy related projects (i.e. refineries).  Anyways, back to my research, starting around mid-February and lasting for about 4 weeks, I will be in Southern California, shadowing different engineers.  This will allow me to get a good glimpse into the industry and see what problems they are currently trying to solve.  Furthermore, it will give me amazing insight into the field that I hope to one day work in, and I may be able to get advice as to how to enter that field going forwards.  Overall, I’m pretty excited to say the least.

Now I feel this is a good time to explain why I am so interested in this industry, especially the downstream energy sector.  Last week I mentioned that I feel some of the largest challenges facing our society will be in the energy sector.  An obvious example of that is the problem of pollution and, more generally, environmental impacts.  I personally believe that one of the easiest ways to reduce environmental impacts, is to make it economically logical for the companies to do so (basically, make it profitable).  Downstream energy is a great example of this, because oftentimes when improvements to efficiency are made in the refinery process, emissions are decreased because of it.  This is where my interest lies, as finding more improvements that both increase economic efficiency and reduce output, are the type of challenges I would like to eventually help solve.

In completely unrelated news, the Broncos are going to the Super Bowl, and I am pretty excited (now only to not choke like 5/7 times they have previously been there).  Anyways, see you guys next week.

Stephen  

Who Am I?

Hello,

My name is Stephen Kistler.  I currently am a Senior at BASIS Scottsdale.  In the upcoming fall, I will be attending Colorado School of Mines, an engineering focused college located in Golden, Colorado (for those unfamiliar with Colorado geography, Golden is just west of Denver).  I was also born outside of Denver, and lived there for the first ten years of my life.  As you would expect, I am pretty excited to return for college.

Golden, Colorado (from Colorado.com)

Now that’s all great, but it still doesn’t tell you much about me.  For that I’ll go over my interests a bit. Academically I am interested in engineering (what a surprise based on the college I choose right?). More specifically, I am choosing between mechanical engineering and petroleum engineering, with the hope of finding a way into the energy sector.  Why the energy sector? Well mostly because I feel that some of the greatest challenges facing our society today lie there, and I would like to attempt to help solve them.  Oh, and there are jobs in that sector.  Shockingly, I also have interests outside of academia.  I love sports, both playing and observing.  I’ve played a ton of sports from soccer to basketball to baseball and try to get up to the mountains to go skiing whenever I can (for the record, skiing is better than boarding, sorry but it’s the truth).  As far as what sports I watch, I am a fan of most sports but especially football and hockey (Go Broncos, and Go Avs).  And yes, I still cheer for the Colorado teams over the Arizona teams.  Sorry Cardinals.  I also enjoy reading.  A Song of Ice and Fire, the Game of Thrones series for the non-book readers, is currently my favorite series.

Ah but you guys are here for my research project.  I am still working on finalizing some details and as such only have so much information to share.  What I can share is that I hope to be working at an energy company in California.  My exact work is still not yet finalized but I hope to be doing work in relation to the refinery process of oil or natural gas.  Overall, I am excited about the prospect of working in the field that I plan on entering as well as gaining experience and insight into it.  I do have to thank Mrs. Bailey (my vector calculus teacher) and her father for this opportunity, as they provided the connections and pointed me towards the company.

Anyways, that’s a bit about me and what I plan to be working on.  I hope to be able to give a fuller picture as to the exact details of my research as it becomes more finalized.

Stephen