Turn raw materials into fuel, medicine, food and plastics at industrial scale. Best paid in Alberta, and tied to the oil price.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed (P.Eng)
$108,000
Engineer-in-training
$57,000
Senior process engineer
$160,000
Alberta oil and gas pays the most of any engineering job in Canada. Pharma in Montreal and Toronto, food processing and pulp and paper pay less but are steadier.
$60,000 to $85,000
EIT (engineer-in-training), straight out of school
The top of that range is Alberta energy companies such as Suncor, Imperial Oil and Cenovus. Food and pharma start closer to $60,000.
$105,000 to $160,000
Licensed process engineer, 5 to 10 years in
Oil sands and refinery engineers with 10 years in often pass $160,000 with bonuses. The catch: when oil prices crash, so do the jobs.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees, and a four year degree is the minimum, so the low end is four years at the cheapest provincial rate plus the professional practice exam and the first year of licence fees. The high end is four years at the most expensive schools plus several years of registration dues as an engineer in training before the licence arrives. The licence itself is a few hundred dollars a year once you have it. Co operative work terms are the offset that is easy to miss, because Alberta placements pay $25 to $35 an hour and can cover most of the tuition.
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees. Alberta co-op terms pay $25 to $35 an hour, which can cover most of it.
Bonuses and share plans
Standard at oil and gas companies. Bonuses can be 10% to 20% of salary in good years.
Pension
Defined-benefit at government, utilities and some older manufacturers. Matched savings elsewhere.
Rotation schedules
Site jobs often run two weeks on, one week off, with flights and camp paid.
Health and dental
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Degree, supervised experience, exam, licence.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Advanced Functions, Calculus, Chemistry and Physics are required. Marks in the high 80s or above at most schools.
Accredited chemical engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
A four-year Bachelor of Engineering or Applied Science at a school accredited by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board. Expect thermodynamics, reactor design and a lot of process calculations.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years
Register with your provincial regulator and work under a licensed engineer. Log your experience.
Professional practice exam
During your EIT (engineer-in-training) years
A law and ethics exam, taken during your training years.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After 4 years
Apply with your experience record and references. Now you can sign off on process designs and take legal responsibility for them.
Chemistry
Required, and the one subject you will never stop using.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Physics
Required.
Biology
Helpful if you want pharma, food or biotech.
Only licensed professional engineers can use the title engineer or sign off on designs. Each province has a regulator: APEGA (the Alberta association), PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario) and EGBC (Engineers and Geoscientists BC) are the big three. Licences transfer between provinces easily, which matters here because chemical engineers often move to Alberta for work and back again when the oil price falls.
Fewer schools than mechanical or electrical. The strong ones:
Ontario
Waterloo, Toronto, McMaster, Queen's, Western, Ottawa.
Quebec
McGill, Polytechnique Montréal, Laval, Sherbrooke.
West
Alberta and Calgary (closest to the energy jobs), UBC (University of British Columbia), Saskatchewan.
Atlantic
Dalhousie, New Brunswick.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Process safety
Plants that handle explosive or toxic material pay for people who prevent accidents.
Process control
Tuning the automated systems that run a plant. Scarce skill, good money.
Project Management Professional (PMP)
The usual route into managing projects and budgets.
A master's or PhD
Required for pharma research and development and for university-linked biotech.
Co-op in Alberta
Energy companies hire their co-op students back at graduation.
Aspen or similar simulation software
Process modelling tools employers expect you to know.
A summer as a plant operator or lab tech
You learn how a plant really runs, which drawings do not show.
Willingness to relocate
The jobs are in Fort McMurray, Sarnia, Montreal and mill towns, not downtown Toronto.
Oil sands sites near Fort McMurray fly engineers in from Calgary, Edmonton and other cities for rotations such as 14 days on and 7 off. Camp, meals and flights are paid, so most of your salary is saved. People do it for a few years to pay off debt or a house, then take a city office job. It is lonely and the days are 12 hours.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Process engineers at a plant start with a morning meeting on what broke overnight. Then it is troubleshooting: a reactor running hot, a pump losing pressure, a product batch out of spec. Afternoons go to design changes, safety reviews and reports. Design engineers at consulting firms build process models and size equipment for plants that do not exist yet. Pharma engineers spend much of the day on documentation, because every batch of medicine must be traceable.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Sarnia, Ontario, has one of the largest clusters of petrochemical plants in Canada, sitting right beside the St. Clair River. Chemical engineers there make polyethylene, synthetic rubber and refined fuels.
Canada produces more oil than any country except the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia, most of it from the Alberta oil sands. Separating bitumen from sand at that scale is a chemical engineering problem.
When oil prices collapsed in 2015, Calgary lost thousands of engineering jobs within two years and office towers sat empty. Chemical engineers who could switch to water, food or pharma weathered it best.
Banting and Best discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921. Making it by the tonne, purely and safely, is what chemical and biochemical engineers do today.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students.