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