Oil Scout

The job of an Oil Scout requires well-honed investigative skills. You’re a researcher, an investigator, and a reporter, and your goal is to gather as much data as you can about individual oil and gas drilling sites.

The type of information you collect creates an overall picture of the activity in the area. You produce daily, weekly, or monthly reports that outline who is doing the drilling; what approvals they have from landowners; at what depth they hit oil; what formations they encountered; and what soil, gas, rock, and oil test results they got.

Oil scouting is a job that requires persistence, people skills, computer skills, an understanding of the oil industry, and persuasiveness. In order to submit the most detailed report, you don’t want to miss any of the juicy tidbits. You check public records daily to identify new drilling sites and those oil wells that have been capped. If you can’t find the answers you need, you travel to the site and nose around.

Oil Scouts are known for their ability to unearth information about the competitor’s drilling sites. So you chat up the workers and ask how the project is going. Have they hit oil? How long is the lease? What kind of soil are they finding?

You might also interview property owners (or their brother, if that’s what it takes). Because you can’t keep your eyes on every well in the country, you periodically congregate with other Oil Scouts in organized, information-sharing meetings.