There are large budgets for geological data analysis, but in contrast to most businesses the oil and gas industry actually has physical constitutive models for

There are large budgets for geological data analysis, but in contrast to most businesses the oil and gas industry actually has physical constitutive models for the phenomena they track; so, instead of domain-agnostic data mining, they are much more interested in being able to solve partial differential equations that model oil flows through various materials so that they can identify useful areas to explore (or optimize a drill insertion etc.). Traditional data mining of the form "when variable x is > 5 and variable y is < 10, expect z to be 42" is not nearly powerful enough in its current form to compete with domain models derived from physics. Silly aside: you might find that the wide variety of non-CS engineers in the oil and gas business will be amused by the idea that "tech jobs" means software jobs ;-)