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08 May 2007
Students don’t get “tyred” of careers at Shell
Helping our students with their future career options is something we take very seriously at Sheffield. We like to show students the wide range of careers that chemical engineers enjoy by arranging as many industrial visits as we can. One such visit is our annual visit to Shell’s facilities in Cheshire. Simon Butler - Careers Liaison Officer for Chemical & Process Engineering – tells us more about the visit to Shell last week:
Early on Tuesday morning I took twenty 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate students across the Pennines to visit the oil company Shell. We were invited by Shell as they recognise the high standard of the chemical engineering at Sheffield and are keen to recruit as many of our graduates as possible. The aim of the trip was to show the students the kind of jobs that chemical engineers do at Shell.
We started off by having a full tour of the Stanlow Manufacturing Complex which was certainly impressive. It is the seventh largest oil refinery in Europe and covers an area of almost 1900 acres which is the same as 300 football pitches. Shell’s engineers process 11 million tons of crude oil a year and produce one sixth of the UK’s petrol demand – approx 4,000 million litres a year. About 1600 people work on the site of which chemical engineers make up a significant number.
One of the most important processing steps in the production of petrol is the Catalytic Cracker which converts heavy fuel molecules into lighter molecules more suitable for use in petrol. Shell uses this step to allow them to produce the maximum quantity of petrol from one barrel of crude oil. Shell processes crude oil worth £1 billion each year in the refinery so it is important that they get the best value that they can from this. We were taken right to the top of the cracker unit and the views were certainly breath-taking (and not just because of the number of steps we had to climb to reach the top!)
Our second destination was Shell’s Technology Centre Thornton where Shell engineers develop and test fuels such as V-Power petrol and lubricants such as Helix. We were shown how they developed V-Power in the lab and how they tested and proved the benefit of the product in cars in their vehicle test facility.
The engineers also design the fuels and lubricants used by the Ferrari Formula 1 Racing team. A Ferrari Formula 1 car is kept on the site and all students took part in their own pit-stop challenge. They worked in teams to change a tyre on the car in the fastest time possible.
During the day we were able to talk to many recent graduates who work at both the refinery and the technology centre to hear first hand about work and careers in Shell.
Joanne Stoves graduated from this Department and works for Shell – first in Amsterdam and now in Houston, USA. You can read her story by clicking on her name in the 'See Also' box.
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