Day 01 - Petroleum WebQuest
Today we are going to begin our brief dive into hydrocarbons by taking a look at petroleum. Petroleum engineers are the highest-earning engineers right out of college, earning between $100,000 and $120,000 per year to start. This high pay reflects a surge in demand in the past 10 years to respond to expansions in America's fossil fuel company efforts to extract fossil fuels from difficult sources. Analysts expect this boom in petroleum engineers to subside in the next handful of years - meaning that few if any of you should expect to see petroleum engineering jobs being promoted at UC or other schools for much longer. That being said, these jobs are still at the peak of the current field of engineering, so we should take a close look at what is going on here, why it is worth so much effort, and why analysts expect that effort to shift away from petroleum soon.
With that in mind, we need to configure our computers to run Shockwave Flash (SWF) files, using the SWF File Player app, which we will have to download, install, and configure. I apologize for the headache here, but the SWF file in question does a great job of bringing a lot of details together accessibly, so we're keeping it. I'll walk you through the installation, and then you will need to answer the questions listed in the Petroleum WebQuest. If you miss class and have to do this on your own, rely on Google searches to come up with the answers to the questions; they are not obscure. You will get to use the answers to your WebQuest work on the exam at the end of this unit, so answer the questions carefully and accurately.
- Anthropogenic
- anything caused by human activity
- Anthropogenic Climate Change
- changes in the long-term atmospheric conditions of the Earth that are attributable primarily to human action
- Climate
- an average of weather conditions over a long period of time in the same location
- Fracking
- the common name for hydraulic fracturing, a process by which petroleum engineers use a highly dense solution to crack rocks deep beneath the surface, causing oil and natural gas to bubble up from an intermingled state that would resist traditional oil pumping techniques
- Hydrocarbon
- any molecule consisting exclusively of hydrogen and carbon atoms; starches, sugars, and fossil fuels are examples of hydrocarbons
