Steve Welch
Ohio University B.S. Geology ’02, University of Tennessee M.S. Geology ’05
I am originally from nearby Chillicothe, OH, where I graduated from high school with a very basic science background and had no idea what a geologist did. Near the end of my junior year of college, Geology 101 got me excited about a career that I could enjoy instead of just a job. I graduated from Ohio University with a B.S. in Geology in 2002 and completed an M.S. degree in Geology at the University of Tennessee in 2005. My thesis research at UT took me to western Montana to study the cyclicity of the mixed siliciclastic-carbonate Helena Formation of the Belt Supergroup. Upon completing my M.S. degree, I started my career as a petroleum geologist at ExxonMobil in Houston, TX. I reside in the Houston, TX, area with his wife, Amy, and daughter, Adelaide.
As an ExxonMobil geoscientist, I have had the opportunity to work on exploration, development, and production assets, worked with cutting-edge research projects at Exxon Mobil’s Upstream Research Company, and even worked within corporate Human Resources on workplace culture. Currently, I am the Global New Opportunities Manager for the Americas within the Exploration and New Ventures organization.
Throughout my career, I have been involved in characterizing subsurface risk and uncertainty, calculating in-place and recoverable hydrocarbon volumes, planning and permitting wells to either discover new hydrocarbon accumulations or reduce uncertainty around existing discoveries, and integrating well data with state-of-the-art 3D seismic data to create a fully integrated model of the subsurface. In addition to meeting evolving business needs related to individual oil and gas fields, I have also worked as a supervisor and manager where my job responsibilities included near-term and long-term career development for the geologist and geophysicists on my team.
I attribute my success in the energy industry, and as a scientist in general, to the geological fundamentals, I learned here at Ohio University. That’s why I was so excited to become a charter board member of the Ohio University Geological Sciences Alumni Advisory Board back in 2009. I am passionate about helping students understand what a petroleum geology career looks like day-to-day, how we should all be excited about every kind of geology because we’re all scientists, and what students should be thinking about now to better prepare themselves for graduate school, job interviews, and a long, exciting career in geology.
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