Florence

In November, I headed over to Italy to give a series of lectures to the inaugural class at General Electric’s “Oil and Gas University” in Florence. This program has 25 students, from 15 countries around the world, including engineers from China Petrochemical International Company, Gazprom in Russia, and PDVSA in Venezuela.

GE recently set up the program in order to provide junior engineers in the oil and gas sector with both managerial and technical expertise, offering six months of training in four disciplines: 1) Leadership; 2) Energy; 3) Oil and Gas Processes; and 4) Rotating Machinery. It takes place at GE’s Florence Learning Center, their largest learning center in Europe. We also had a number of joint lectures at the Engineering School at the University of Pisa.

Pisa

Our session was in the “Energy” module, and I was there—along with Sylvie Saulnier from IFP, Dominique Dron from Ecole des Mines de Paris, Stijn Santen from CO2-Net B.V. in the Netherlands, and a number of other European firms and governmental agencies—to address key environmental topics for the oil and gas industry.

Please check out GE’s Scholarship Program for young corporate-sponsored engineers in the oil and gas sector, and help spread the word about this challenging (and very effective!) training program.