The looming shortage among US-based companies of senior technical people - geologists, geophysicists and engineers - is one of the biggest concerns facing the oilpatch today. By one estimate, half the technical people in the industry will be eligible for retirement within 6 years.

Executive search firm Preng & Associates in Houston follows graduates of US technical schools, including Colorado School of Mines, Texas A&M and the University of Texas, and it has seen the number of graduates fall from the early 1980s through the 1990s, said David Preng, president.

Most companies are finding people to fill their vacant positions, but recruiting is getting tougher and more expensive. Oil and gas companies are competing for the best new graduates, and they are recruiting from each other. Corporate raids are commonplace.

Incentives also are commonly used to entice potential employees, he said. Those might include signing bonuses, autos and other financial inducements.

Companies could look outside the United States. Engineers are available in Russia and China, Preng added, but the language barrier is a problem, and thenthere's no guarantee that a recruit won't go through the training period and then return home.

The industry went through a similar people shortage 30 years ago. Then, oil and gas companies went after mathematics and physics majors coming out the schools and trained them. Kerr-McGee Corp. Chairman Luke Corbett is a physics major trained by Amoco.

That kind of training may be more difficult now. Amoco once had a training center in Tulsa. Marathon had a training and research center in Littleton, Colo. Arco had its training center in Plano, Texas. These three and others have been shut down.

That lack of capacity to train incoming people and the lack of college graduates over the past 20 years has given good technical people between the ages of 30 and 45 in the industry the ability to write their own employment tickets, Preng said. They will be in the industry for several years, and they will have little competition for their jobs.

Even moving into the executive ranks, people with an oilfield technical background capable of handling the top executive positions in a company are hard to find, he added.

Asked what strategy he would employ if he were the top executive of an independent oil and gas company, Preng said he would try to recruit the best talent from other companies and give them golden handcuffs to keep them. He also would attempt to bring good people out of retirement and, depending on the size of the company, look to hire graduating students, challenge them professionally and do whatever it would take to keep them.

For example, an independent oil and gas company working in the Gulf of Mexico can't hire a Texas A&M graduate and immediately put that person in charge of a major drilling operation, and the company doesn't have the time and resources to train a new person. It would need an experienced hand. A larger company, on the other hand, might have the training resources, but it should do a cost-benefit analysis to determine what is best for the company.

Someone, he added, should sit down and figure that it takes a certain number of technical people to satisfy the demand for an anticipated number of barrels of oil and cubic feet of gas and come up with a plan to make sure the industry can get enough people from all sources, primarily the universities, to satisfy the demand.

Someone needs to determine how much oil and gas we will need to determine the number of engineers, geologists and geophysicists needed to find the required number of barrels of oil. The industry needs to determine how much, on average, one person can find, and the universities have to tell people this is a good business, Preng said.

If it takes X number of people supplying Y barrels of oil or thousands of cubic feet of gas, the nation should determine whether there are enough university programs to produce them and put policies into effect to educate the needed people if there is a genuine shortage, he added.