Primary Assignment

Geoscience Permanent Positions

Organization

• ExxonMobil Exploration

• ExxonMobil Development

• ExxonMobil Production

Degree/Discipline Needed

• MS/PhD Geophysics, with BS Geology desirable

• MS/PhD Geology, with strong geophysics/math/physics background desirable

Typical Work Location

Houston, Texas or New Orleans, Louisiana; affiliate offices in regions/countries such as: Africa (possibly Angola, Chad, Nigeria), Australia, Great Britain, Indonesia, Malaysia, Norway, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the Middle East.

Typical Starting Opportunities

Geoscientists with ExxonMobil have the opportunity to develop a wide range of skills and expertise throughout their careers. Multiple assignments in operations and/or research ensure the breadth and needed depth of experience for success. Geologists or geoscientists have opportunities to develop broad backgrounds necessary to do exploration and production mapping and prospecting or to specialize in various technical aspects of the exploration and production process.

New Hire Development Programs have been developed with the goal of providing on-the-job experiences and training for geologists and geophysicists. They are designed to provide the fundamental experiences needed to explore for and produce hydrocarbons. The programs typically involve a number of rotational assignments in the first 2 years followed by a developmental assignment, which is designed to apply and improve an individual's integration skills. The goal is to expose new hires to skills and techniques and to develop expert competency in a minimum of one geoscience skill area in a timely matter. Additional areas of expertise are achieved as individuals advance in their careers.

The focus in the rotational assignments is to build a basic, working knowledge of oil and gas exploration/production and learn data acquisition and analysis techniques. ExxonMobil provides both formal and on-the-job training in subsurface mapping and prospecting techniques, sequence stratigraphy and facies analysis, prospect sizing and applications. The focus in the specialized geological assignments is to build skills to expert level in areas such as will site operations and formations evaluation. Specialized geophysical assignments include seismic data acquisition design and quality control, seismic processing, seismic applications (direct hydrocarbon indicator analysis, rock properties work, seismic modeling), 3D visualization or gravity and magnetics.

Typical Career Path

Future assignments could be in a regional/frontier group or a new venture team in exploration, or a new field development team or mature field development group in Production. Work in a regional/frontier team is done on a play to basin-wide scale to identify areas of future exploration interest, or to better define play controls in an existing exploration trend. An example of a new venture team is the Chad/Niger group where a concession has been acquired and some discoveries made. There the emphasis is on confirming discoveries and testing new prospects in order to refine the reserves and economic assessment and determine whether/when production operations should commence. A new field development team focuses on a recently-discovered field in an area with existing production operations. Their mission is to determine field size, identify drive mechanisms and reservoir and hydrocarbon characteristics, and develop a depletion plan.

A strong emphasis in these assignments will be to build skills in integrating geological data and techniques, such as paleontology, outcrop and core/cuttings descriptions, and production data, as well as integrating geophysical data and techniques such as 2D and 3D seismic interpretation and seismic applications techniques (DHI analysis, modeling). Our goal is to provide both exploration and production assignments early in one's career and, over the long term, to develop Geoscientists who prospect by integrating both geological and geophysical data.