PETROLEUM SCIENTIST 1-3

State of Louisiana•Baton Rouge, LA

31d•Onsite

About The Position

The Office of Permitting and Compliance (OPC) oversees all permitting and regulatory functions within the Department, ensuring clarity, consistency, and regulatory integrity. By streamlining processes, accelerating permitting timelines and enhancing data-driven decision-making, the Office ensures compliance with environmental standards while supporting responsible economic development. OPC centralizes all permitting and compliance functions, aligning engineering, geology, ecology, design, and compliance divisions into a single workflow. Its structure includes integrity and production audits, UIC and storage regulation, groundwater protection, coastal permits and mitigation, and reservoir and legacy site management. This Petroleum Scientist 1, 2, or 3 position performs highly responsible engineering work of an administrative and technical nature pursuant to the Louisiana UIC program and certain additional E&P and industrial waste disposal activities. The incumbent will also perform complex technical Investigative and enforcement work on a statewide basis for the Engineering Division. The position requires inter-parish travel and can expect to travel approximately 20% of the time. A bachelor's degree in a geoscience field or engineering. The official job specifications for this role, as defined by the State Civil Service, can be found here. This Petroleum Scientist 1, 2, or 3 position is located within the Engineering Division of the Office Permitting & Compliance and is domiciled in Baton Rouge, LA. This position will ensure waste disposal practices regulated by the Engineering Division will not result in the introduction of contaminants into surface waters, subsurface geologic strata containing underground sources of drinking water, or endanger mineral resources of the state.

Requirements

A bachelor's degree in a geoscience field or engineering.

Responsibilities

Reviews permit applications submitted to the Engineering division for conformance with state regulations, including those for drilling, converting, and working-over injection wells.
Reviews applications requesting authority to permanently plug and abandon injection wells to ensure that the procedure used in the plugging operations conform to state and federal criteria.
Conducts technical review of applications to encapsulate NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) contaminated waste in wells slated for abandonment.
Performs technical reviews of active injection wells to ensure that the method of well construction adequately provides for isolation of the USDW from the injection zone.
Conducts investigations concerning the design, construction, maintenance, and operations of wells at existing facilities.
Inspects and monitors by-product operations, including hazardous waste injections wells, solution mining of salt, hydrocarbon storage in solution-mined salt caverns, enhanced oil recovery wells, oil and gas exploration and production waste injection wells, etc.
Performs the review and interpretation of pressure transient tests, radioactive tracer surveys, well logs, in-situ reservoir stress tests, and any other test data required in the permitting process.
Maintains files on waste disposal wells, salt dome cavern operations, carbon sequestration operations, and site operations.
Performs technical review of applications for permits to dispose of drilling and/or workover waste down the annuli of production wells pursuant to LAC 43:XIX.315.
Provides training of coworkers in any tasks presented herein or otherwise requested by a supervisor.
May perform other duties as assigned