KEEN'zine3

You don’t have to travel to Silicon Valley to see progress and innovation. Entrepreneurs may start great companies, but intrapreneurs help them stay successful. Corporations need in-house thought leaders who build upon a company’s pre-existing product and are constantly scouting for new solutions. The continued success and growth of even the oldest and most established industries — such as oil and gas — can be much to the credit of intrapreneurship. Saint Louis University’s KEEN graduates Mark Reed (2012) and Greg Keogh (2011) are engineers at BP and National Oilwell Varco (NOV), respectively. But Reed and Keogh aren’t garden-variety employees. These self-declared intrapreneurs have front row seats to the dramatic changes and opportunities within the oil and gas industry. In a world thirsty for new energy sources, companies are constantly researching new ways of exploring and extracting oil and gas located in areas that are currently unreachable. Reserves located in deep ocean water and within complex rock formations are some of the most recent challenges faced by engineers. Oil and gas can be located far below the ocean’s surface, sometimes six miles beneath the seabed where temperatures can top 300 degrees Fahrenheit. At those depths, pressure can reach a staggering 20,000 psi. Extracting these resources safely, efficiently, and with environmental responsibility is an enormous undertaking. BP estimates that the amount of oil obtained from subsea oil and gas reservoirs will more than double in the next four years. [1] Within the next two decades, an estimated 10 to 20 billion barrels could be recovered from areas previously unreachable. These efforts will be dependent upon technologies and methods that have not yet been perfected, and some that have not yet been conceived. Engineers should think outside of the box and reframe challenges as opportunities. Existing systems must be made safer, more durable, and more capable. Engineers and scientists must imagine and create new machinery, tools, and methods of exploration and extraction. Oil and gas companies encourage researchers and scientists to foster new ideas. In order for the ideas % KEOGH PHOTO COURTESY OF: FMC TECHNOLOGIES REED 33 32