When people are looking for a career, they may not immediately think about becoming a petroleum engineer but that is perhaps because they do not realize the potential salary. In a nutshell, petroleum engineers are the ones who determine how to extract oil from the ground. The methods that they create for extracting oil from all sorts of wells determines exactly how valuable a particular oil well will be for the oil company. They also spend time devising ways to make older wells more productive in the amount of oil that they produce