Profile

I currently live in London with two housemates I’ve known since school. Before COVID, I enjoyed making the most of what London has to offer and would go out with my friends to restaurants, go to festivals, go to museums… whatever really! With work you get a set amount of days to take off and I definitely try to make the most of them and love to go abroad to experience new cultures,  food and activities. Between university and starting at the job I am currently at, I travelled around the world for 8 months. Some highlights included sky diving, canyon swinging, scuba diving with sharks/whales/manta rays and meeting quokkas…

I work on a variety of projects for both the oil & gas industry and the renewables industry. My main focus is offshore oil & gas.

Oil naturally occurs in rock in the earth’s crust so we have to drill down through the rock to get oil back up to the surface to be able to bring it back to shore and use it in our every day lives. Huge platforms are built offshore (see the picture below) which have all the equipment to be able to do this. (There are opportunities to go out and work on the platform but I haven’t had this chance yet!)

My main role is doing the oil spill modelling. I look at the worst-case scenario so this is when there is a large build up of pressure which causes an uncontrolled release of the oil. I use modelling software, which takes into account winds and currents, to see how far the oil may spread across the ocean and whether it might reach the beaches or any protected sites. If it does reach protected sites then I have to look at why these are protected – this could be because there is a rare animal in that location. Animals around the UK which are protected include otters, bottlenose dolphins, whales and many seabirds including the puffin.

Sometimes I even have to calculate the potential cost of the clean up. This includes looking at the cost to tourism (who wants to spend a day at the beach when the sand is covered in oil?!), fisheries (these may have to close if oil gets too close as the fish may become contaminated) or ports/harbours (may have to pay to get people’s boats cleaned). These are just a few examples but there are other many things that need to be considered when trying to work out this cost.

I work on a number of other projects to do with oil and gas operations as well as renewable energy, in particular wind turbines. One interesting project is calculating how much carbon  is involved in the project, from the carbon within materials used to make the wind turbine, to how much is required in terms of energy and then once they are no longer needed how much could be saved by recycling some of the materials.

I usually arrive at work for 8am although it is flexible as long as you do 8 hours of work a day! My morning is spent catching up with work mates about what they did at the weekend/the night before, whilst looking through any emails and planning which projects need to be completed first.

I usually work independently but questions are always welcome, whether that is going up to someone in the office or calling another colleague from one of the offices in Scotland or Australia (we have offices there too!). As I’ve mentioned, I work on a variety of projects and it is whoever is free will do that piece of work, you don’t necessarily get to select what you work on.

We all usually have lunch around the same time (12:30) and we can take an hour off. If it is sunny a group will sit outside, or of course you can do your own thing. On Tuesdays a few people play squash at the local courts, Thursday is football and Friday is lunch time yoga! Although only if you want to!

My afternoon is similar to the morning and depends what projects I have on. If I have started at 8, I will finish at 5 pm.