"Our industry, because of its complexity, it needs technology. And technology is a very good tool to reduce risk, because it allows you to have this digital model of your reservoir or your facilities, and it gives you a degree, to reduce risk, and that's valuable."

In this episode, I’m in conversation with Mario del Pino who is a petroleum engineer and entrepreneur. Mario represents the next generation of oil industry professionals and his perspectives on the industry are helpful to understand how to improve the attractiveness of the industry to talent. 

Mario has spent several years gaining deep education in petroleum engineering, and is a self-professed nerd on technology. He has worked a major gas play in Peru for several years, and during the pandemic, helped deploy innovative solutions to bridge the challenges of social distancing in operations. He has left oil and gas to help companies with their various transition challenges. 

"Digital technology in the industry has been so heavily dominated by major players that innovation has been lagging a lot. You have this kind of oligopolies, where you have certain very well established companies that they have their software, there's not that much incentive to develop new tools."

Mario del Pino is not only an academically stubborn Petroleum Engineer, having a Bachelor and two Master degrees in the subject, but also a fierce advocate of the role of our industry as a catalyst for economical development. With only 30 years, he has experience in drilling operations, surface facilities construction, production and transport operations, and project engineering. Over the last years he has embraced the world of data, having worked with most of the state of the art technologies that are disrupting our industry, including digital twins, machine learning models, smart wearables, drone-driven surveyors, and more. He is also an active member of the Society of Petroleum Engineering, being the Young Professionals Chairperson of the SPE Lima Section, and has recently been selected to be part of the SPE International Young Members Engagement Committee

"A bunch of brilliant, really young people eventually left the industry, and that's a huge loss for the industry, because we have people that right now are working at Google or Facebook. We've lost that massive potential..."

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariodelpino