2025 Pinnacle Award: Christine Ehlig-Economides is a Pioneer in the Field and Classroom

As an expert for Schlumberger in integrated reservoir characterization, well design and well stimulation, Christine Ehlig-Economides contributed greatly to her field while in the field.

But she is recognized most for her distinguished career as a pioneering petroleum engineering professor, training the current and future generations of the industry.

For these reasons, Ehlig-Economides is Hart Energy’s 2025 Pinnacle Award recipient, celebrating a lifetime of exceptional achievement in the energy sector and academia.

She helped establish petroleum engineering departments at universities. She developed methods of analyzing well test data from multilayer reservoirs that became the worldwide standard for the oil industry. And, of course, she has served as a role model for women in engineering.

She started out in academia, moved to Schlumberger and, after 20 years at what is now SLB, she returned to universities full time in 2003, first at Texas A&M University and then to the University of Houston, where she currently resides as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen distinguished university chair in petroleum engineering.

Ehlig-Economides began her studies in mathematics, earning her bachelor’s degree from Rice University before continuing for her master’s from the University of Kansas. She then pivoted to chemical engineering and, in 1979, earned her doctorate in petroleum engineering from Stanford University.

Ehlig-Economides discussed her career and the evolving role of women in energy with Hart Energy Editorial Director Jordan Blum.

Jordan Blum: How have the prospects for women in the energy sector transformed over the years, including your personal journey?

Christine Ehlig-Economides: I always tell people that a huge turnaround for me was actually the Title IX under [President Richard] Nixon’s administration. I graduated with honors from Rice [University] with a math and science background and nobody would offer me a job. Nobody. And the reasons were, “Are you married?” “Yes, oh, well you might get pregnant. No, we can’t hire you.” Or, “No, I’m sorry, we have too many bachelors in our lab.” I mean, really awful stuff. Furthermore, I didn’t take very many engineering classes because we were clearly not welcome there. As soon as Title IX passed, it was revolutionary and, in particular, young women went into chemical engineering. I don’t know how much you know about engineering, but chemical is not considered the easy choice.

That opened the door for me. Then somebody dared to hire me at the Kansas Geological Survey, and that just kicked things off. I was super well-prepared to get into engineering. So, when it came to look into a Ph.D.—this is around 1973—the person I was working for told me, “I know you’re interested in computer science, but there’s no future there.” (Laughs) There was just a real academic opposition to computer science in that timeframe. Instead, I was urged to go and talk to chemical engineering, and I did, but I took an interest in petroleum engineering because my first job was groundwater. It occurred to me that multiple phases would be more interesting than just water. So, that’s how I got started. Petroleum engineering was not known for having a lot of women involved, but it has evolved. And we do see women achieving very well in petroleum engineering. High on my list would be [Occidental Petroleum CEO] Vicki Hollub because she’s CEO of a large independent oil company and very innovative, at that.

It’s exciting to see what women have achieved over time. At Schlumberger, at one point, women wanted to try to get together and management forbade us from doing that. They didn’t want us to meet. I have no idea why. But then, as women started to get to VP and higher-level positions in the industry, they started asking Schlumberger, “Why don’t I see any women at my level in your company?” It changed. That’s the way Schlumberger worked. In the 1960s, it took the decision to hire people in all the countries where they operated. Wherever you went in Schlumberger, you saw a very diverse international crowd, except not many women. But that, too, evolved. It eventually came to about 16% women. And where did that come from? That’s about the percentage that were graduating in engineering. It was not about excluding women. They did not want to compromise the skill set.

I was very immersed in this evolution of women becoming more visible in an industry that wasn’t known for hiring women. But industries in general were not hiring women when I got started.

JB: Obviously, things have evolved a lot, but do you think the energy industry still has a ways to go?

CE: Well, really, women do have opportunities in the petroleum industry, and we do see some shining stars. There is a tendency to promote women in softer directions that I find a little bit uncomfortable, but you do see some women that are genuinely, technically as good as anybody you can find. I guess technical bias is not what everybody cares about, but it’s certainly where I come from.

JB: What’s your take on some of the opposing forces potentially hurting petroleum engineering enrollment. On one side, you have the anti-fossil fuel effort that discourages some people. On the other hand, and maybe more lately, there almost seems to be an anti-science push encouraging more people to enter trades and not achieve higher levels of academia. I wanted to get your thoughts on the challenge there and how things are going within the world of petroleum engineering academia?

CE: Well, this anti-science feeling is utterly disturbing. Across the board, it’s so misplaced and so stupid for the country. As to petroleum engineering, this is a big challenge, I think, for the discipline because it’s challenging what we do. It’s not a choice for somebody that wants an easy ride, but, for people who do go ahead and do petroleum engineering, it is really interesting, the material we cover and what they do in the workplace. It is definitely something that someone with some technical talent will enjoy doing.

This natural bias that we fear is communicated within the high schools and even before may be discouraging the best talent from taking an interest in petroleum engineering. Over my career, the numbers in petroleum engineering in the United States have mostly declined, except for the period between 2010 and 2014 when the industry desperately needed more people and that was easily known by young people. The University of Houston was way overpopulated at that point, and we were not the only ones.

Apart from that, we are now at a time where petroleum engineering programs generally struggle, but we think we’ve seen the base of the valley. This has happened before. And, so, enrollment numbers are increasing and, hopefully, we’ll be able to graduate enough people for the industry. There was a time when the big companies, the Chevrons and the Shells and the Exxons, they had excellent training programs, so they could hire engineers, really, of any background. But they don’t have the resources that they had in the past.

And federal funding has not favored traditional petroleum engineering. With collaboration with companies, there has been some. But, even that, it’s not core business directions. It’s CO₂ storage, geothermal, these sorts of things. It’s going to be interesting to see whether [new Energy Secretary] Chris Wright will have any impact on what is available for research funding in the Department of Energy.

But I do find the energy transition space wonderful. It is rich in innovative directions, so it’s not all bad for petroleum engineering research to take some interest in transition directions. I also think that our industry needs to look for alternatives that reflect concerns over the continued combustion of fossil fuels. My own research interests favor hydrogen for that reason. It is a fascinating time to be in the industry, but I can’t remember a time I was in the industry that I couldn’t have said that.

JB: Switching gears a bit, when in your career did you think it would be economically possible for there to be a shale boom for tight rock?

CE: I think when it happened. (Laughs) And here’s why. My earlier career, my 20 years at Schlumberger, was strictly international. Even though I was based for a significant part of the time in the United States, Schlumberger had my sites on international companies and operations—West Africa, Indonesia, South America, anywhere but the United States. So, I was woefully ignorant (laughs) actually of U.S. resources. But, when this shale gas success started to happen, it just totally caught my attention. I really learned U.S. unconventional more than conventional. It was and is technically challenging.

Something that’s amazing about the United States is mineral rights, because landowners have the rights of the minerals below them. I think this is a big key to why the United States has led the world consistently over history in technical advances. When the landowner has something in the game, they get a return on what happens. They’re part of the team that agrees to the risk. It’s really impressive to see what advances have come because of that, and we’re the only country like that.

JB: Do you think we’ve pretty much cracked the code on the shale boom, or do you think there’s still major technological discoveries left to be made?

CE: It’s pretty straightforward. The advantage is, you can almost look at it on a well-by-well basis. With $5 to $10 million to invest, you’re going to get a return on investment. Compare that to, I don’t know, half a billion to make something happen in deepwater. And that’s just your starting point, right? It’s a big enabler. You can go out there and make a profit.

Now, there are some issues showing up. Texas is headlining them because these wells that look like geysers are erupting brine. I fear that that is related to produced water disposal in Texas. So, instead of earthquakes like what was happening in Oklahoma, we’re getting surface leaks of brine. Now, I may have that wrong. I’m trying to … actually study it and confirm these likely connections. But, right now, it’s more of a temporal connection. We are injecting a lot into formations that are not far from where this is happening. It looks like there’s a connection, but we need to make sure the subsurface supports that.

I will say this. When the industry discovers that we have a risk like that, we fix it very quickly. We don’t keep doing something that’s causing farmland to get contaminated with saltwater. We don’t do that.

JB: Where else do you think there might be discoveries left to be made, both domestically and internationally?

CE: Well, we know two arenas of interest apart from what’s already there. I mean, with the unconventional, the recovery factors are like 10% or less. So, 90% of the hydrocarbon is still there. There’s lots to do to improve the recovery factor. And you could say, “Well, why don’t we do that already?” Well, because it’s too profitable to just keep drilling the wells as is because the first oil is at a much higher rate, and you get the recovery you need to justify keeping that well, and now you have that well. So, there’s a lot of future for getting more oil and shale gas.

Two known enormous hydrocarbon prospects are at two ends of a spectrum. At one end, it’s cold because that’s going to be your gas hydrates. They’re not super cold, but they’re around freezing temperature and relatively shallow. This is methane that is in crystalline form, hydrate form with water. Wherever you have hydrates, and we know they’re everywhere. We know where they are because the drillers have drilled through them. They’re a drilling risk, but there’s 200 times the methane content when it’s in hydrate form. But we don’t know really how to produce it. The Japanese are probably the lead on this because they have hydrate formations near Japan.

The other end of the spectrum is the kerogen oil shale. Some people call it oil shale. This is basically immature source rock—young, a bit shallow—and it hasn’t been buried deep enough and in a high enough temperature to convert kerogen to oil and gas. But, if we heat it up, we can speed up Mother Nature. There are places in the world that do produce this kerogen shale oil, and U.S. land has huge shale oil resources, so don’t look for us running out of oil.