ebb and flow ... Cents and sensibilities
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: Michael J Economides
  Monday, April 07, 2008

The oil business has always been for the traveling man, the wanderer and the restless. It brought in a special type of character: innovative, tough, unfazed in adversity. And even though oil is the biggest business in the world, it has never been loaded with gobs of people and often acted as a village, with engineers and specialists knowing each other across countries and continents. There are a lot fewer good drillers, good cementers and good production engineers than people think. They move from place to place for more money and more interesting work.

A diaspora of sorts took place mushrooming 40 years ago with a decided American flavor, soon encompassing dozens of nationalities but all acting in that can-do manner honed in the oilfields of Texas and Oklahoma for the previous half century, at least: work hard and party even harder. And it transcended politics. It was always kind of funny to find a cowboy-booted, tobacco-chewing, tool pusher from Odessa, Texas working in the Libyan desert while Ronald Reagan was bombing the country.

International oil companies and, especially, service companies showed the way and people gained an international flavor, not too intellectual but certainly one that let them adjust easily across cultures. Not very many oil business people would necessarily visit the art museums or the historical ruins of their, temporarily adopted, countries but had little problem blending in, even becoming ridiculous. Legend has it that all the expatriate employees of a particular service company in Venezuela, over a period of five years, divorced their wives, bringing back trophy twenty-somethings. Some American and western European engineers worked in dozens of countries; I have worked in over 70 and lived in seven. I had a blast and, if I have to live over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Corruption and personal safety issues were daily routines but most grinned and bore it. It was part of the romance of the job to have to put up with certain things. The stories that one could tell back home made the experience worthwhile.

But things have changed for the worse, not that Nigeria, Colombia, Algeria and Angola have ever been confused with tourist destinations. Countries like Russia and Venezuela got into a political funk that excludes a lot of expatriates from the traditional countries. Iran and Iraq have been in a maelstrom of war and hostility. Competition from hitherto unknown companies from China, India and Russia itself has made inroads even in countries where nobody went before. Not even the Sudanese go into some parts of the Sudan where the Chinese produce 500,000 barrels per day.

But there is more. Costs have shot up and from the vantage of the American dollar they have climbed into the stratosphere. An acceptable Moscow hotel would set an American back $600 or more for far less service than a $60 motel in Houston. London, Paris and Milan through Sterling and the Euro burn your money. A ride in a taxi from a European airport to city center can easily cost $130, incomparable to an equivalent US ride.

It used to be part of the fun, figuring the nuances of the system, the special flights, the upgrades, getting the best out of it. All of us at one time or another became our own travel agents, musing on how much better we were than the ones calling themselves as such.

But traveling recently has become eminently unpleasant and not where one might have expected it, in developing countries. Everywhere, aging and inadequate infrastructure seems to torment. September 11, 2001 for sure has exacerbated trips but particularly in the US. Lines are longer and nastier. Arriving at many airports two hours before a flight may not be enough. An hour of connecting time is out of the question in some other airports. Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is designed to make you miss your connection. I spent an hour in a Milan airport line to have my passport merely glanced at when flying to another EU country, theoretically an internal trip. A single immigration officer handled us all.

Invocations of ‘my security’ have given rise to the barking at the top of lungs, minimum wage airport screeners and a bigger license for flight attendants to cajole people and to wear a permanent sour expression. Hassle is good for you now, even in business class. I thought that as I became older, flight attendants would look younger to me. Is it me or do they seem more worn than anyone else?

I am lamenting an era that went away. I am sure we, as an industry and as people, will manage and may still come out ahead. I still travel a lot and I still get bored if I don’t. Last November I visited six countries in less than two weeks. But, what we thought was a winner, ‘going places’, is becoming increasingly less convincing. OE

Michael J Economides is a professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, and editor-in-chief of the Energy Tribune. The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect OE’s position.

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