LAST month, Lucile Franoux, a petroleum engineer with Maersk Oil in Aberdeen, started a six-month exchange internship in Mexico with Pemex, the Mexican state oil company.
Maersk Oil has been building a long-term relationship with Pemex, which includes training and employee-exchange opportunities. It happens that, currently, a drilling engineer from the Mexican company is working with Maersk in Denmark learning about horizontal-drilling techniques.
Speaking at the start of her Mexico adventure, Franoux said: “I’m very excited because this will be a big challenge both professionally and personally. I’m going somewhere I have never been before … to a new culture … and will be working with fractured reservoirs, which are completely different from the high-permeability sandstone and tight carbonate reservoirs I am used to in the UK and Denmark.”
Franoux completed her engineering degree in France and then studied for an MSc in petroleum engineering at Imperial College, London, before joining Maersk Oil’s graduate MITAS (Maersk International Technology and Science) training programme.
“I became interested in the oil industry after speaking to people in different sectors, and the only people who were passionate and enthusiastic about their work were the ones from oil&gas,” said Franoux, who is now equally enthusiastic about her chosen field.
“After I joined Maersk Oil, I spent two years on rotation, gaining experience of different jobs in Aberdeen, Denmark and offshore in the North Sea. One of the highlights was getting to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where we were taught about entrepreneurship and innovation.”
Her specialisation is in horizontal drilling, a method of extraction which is now widely used to recover oil and gas from hard-to-reach reservoirs around the world.
“Horizontal drilling is something Maersk Oil does in every country in which it has operated production,” said Franoux.
Indeed, in May 2008, the company completed the world’s longest offshore horizontal oil well in Qatari waters with a record horizontal section of 10,900m (35,761ft).
Franoux has been learning Spanish and says she is really looking forward to the chance to extend her technological knowledge, act as an ambassador for Maersk and make friends in a new country.
“It is an opportunity for me to share expertise and strengthen my understanding about other oil& gas provinces,” she added.
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