Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was. Today, he’d probably major in petroleum engineering — at least if he could hack the curriculum — because that’s where the money is now.

“At a time when the U.S. is suffering from persistently high unemployment, demand for professionals in the oil and gas industry couldn’t be better — and their supply is struggling to keep pace,” said Raymond James & Associates Inc. analyst Pavel Molchanov in a note Monday.

Molchanov cited statistics from the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) that show the nation’s petroleum engineers (PE) are aging, with 52% of them 45 or older, up from 45% in 1997. Only 24% are younger than 35, according to SPE.

“The data implies that within 10 to 15 years, at least half will be retiring, depriving the industry of a huge pool of technological talent and expertise,” Molchanov wrote. Retirements could also be hastened by the hefty nest eggs held by some PEs, whose shares in energy companies have grown in value.

So when it comes to PEs and other skilled energy patch workers, the supply side is weak. But the demand side is not.

Molchanov cited Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the “mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction” job category. “[C]urrent unemployment is 6.2%, the third-lowest level of any private-sector category.” According to SPE, median base pay for PEs in the United States last year was $135,000, representing a 4.7% increase from the previous year. Molchanov emphasized that the salary growth happened in a stagnant wage environment for workers overall.

Twenty-eight years ago, about 11,000 U.S. students were studying to become PEs; today, the number is less than half that, according to SPE. Many of the PEs in the country’s future will not be homegrown but will come from outside the country. “Even with some growth in recent years, the number of U.S. PEs is down by roughly one-third since 1985,” Molchanov said.

And a newly minted PE isn’t the same as someone who has worked in the industry for several years. “It can take five to 10 years for a new PE to learn the field, so even as the new graduates each year begin their training, it will take a long time for them to reach the experience level of the PEs they are replacing,” he said.

So for now, the industry will have to slake its thirst for talent by hiring from abroad, from Russia and the Middle East, for instance, and retaining the experienced workers it now has for as long as possible. For the foreseeable future at least, old petroleum engineers won’t retire; they’ll just become consultants.

“This [situation] is analogous to the industry’s severe underinvestment in infrastructure over the past 25-30 years,” Molchanov said. “The ‘graying of the oil patch’ is arguably an even more acute problem because while a rig can be built in months, it takes many years to train a new petroleum professional.”

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