Energy Enrollments Inch Higher as Students See Multiple Paths to a Career

Enrollment is on the rise at top U.S. petroleum engineering and energy graduate programs, say administrators at universities that have long supplied new talent to the energy space. Many are enticed by the improved outlook for oil and gas demand. Others are excited by emerging opportunities in low-carbon power. And some are driven by innovation in alternative fuels.

At 22 schools worldwide reporting first-year enrollments in petroleum engineering programs, the number of first-year students rose from 535 in 2022 to 745 in 2024, according to data collected by Lloyd Heinze, professor emeritus at Texas Tech University.

Energy master’s programs also are seeing increases as employment opportunities in both oil and gas production and new technologies rise amid predictions that a steady surge in demand over the next 25 years will boost investment in both legacy and emerging energy production, school administrators told Oil and Gas Investor (OGI).

Historically, student interest waxes and wanes with the oil and gas industry’s fortunes. The shale revolution sent enrollments soaring to a peak of 3,206 first-year petroleum engineering students in 2015, Heinze’s data indicate. But OPEC set the stage for a steep drop in commitment to the discipline when it flooded the market and sent per-barrel prices to the $20s in a bid to curtail U.S. production. For two years, the price lingered at less than $50/bbl while the worldwide supply/demand dynamic rebalanced.

Before crude prices could regain momentum, the COVID pandemic that began in 2020 decimated fuel demand and further depressed student interest in oil and gas career options, school administrators told OGI. The best and the brightest prospects at universities were taking different career paths than oil and gas production, just as a generation of industry veterans were retiring during the “great crew change” of the last decade.

Administrators say they saw interest wane both at energy-focused MBA programs such as those offered at Texas Christian University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and in the petroleum engineering programs at schools that include Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin (UT), the Colorado School of Mines, Texas Tech University, the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and Pennsylvania State University (Penn State).

Fueling the future

Today, rising enrollments are fueled by a growing awareness that prospects for a long career in energy are bright, university administrators say. The data supports investment in all types of energy development and production, a trend that is already paying dividends for graduates.

“Although this generation of students has been told that oil and gas are going away, I think they’re realizing that this is not the case,” Jennifer Miskimins, head of the petroleum engineering department at the Colorado School of Mines, told OGI. “They now believe it’s possible to have full careers.”

At Penn State, though fewer international scholars are enrolling, more U.S. students are enrolled in petroleum engineering classes because graduates are getting jobs, said Hamid Emami-Meyodi, program chairman of petroleum and natural gas engineering.

“Demand for energy has been increasing, especially after the outbreak of the Ukraine-Russia war, and students are seeing that industry is trying to hire,” Emami-Meyodi told OGI. “Our job placement was 90% last year and almost 100% the year before.”

Both Texas A&M and UT, two of the most prolific U.S. educators of petroleum engineers, say the industry is recruiting and hiring their graduates. Administrators at the schools say they are concerned that universities might not be able to ramp up to meet demand.

“We have 120 incoming (first-year students) this year,” Matthew Balhoff, chair of the petroleum and geosystems engineering department at UT, told OGI. “That’s our largest class in 10 years.”

Texas A&M granted 39% more petroleum engineering degrees in the 2024 academic year than the previous year and has seen its sophomore class grow by approximately 50% in the current school year, said Tom Blasingame, head of Texas A&M’s department of petroleum engineering.

Both programs adopted strategies of restraining enrollment during boom times, with the goal of matching degrees granted to industry demand so graduates wouldn’t struggle to find their first jobs. Oil prices have been high enough, long enough that they are expecting strong industry demand for graduates now entering the pipeline.

Blasingame cautions that UT and Texas A&M will find it hard to expand rapidly if industry demand for graduates surges higher than anticipated.

“Texas A&M currently produces almost 20%” of the bachelor’s degrees in petroleum engineering in the U.S., Blasingame said. UT and A&M could face “significant challenges” boosting enrollment if smaller programs cannot increase enrollment to meet demand like UT and A&M are doing now, he said.

Careers of consequence

Petroleum engineering is experiencing renewed interest—despite an anti-fossil fuel slant in the mass media and teaching in grade schools and high schools that disparage the oil and gas industry, all school administrators said.  

This lack of realism and balance is unfortunate because skilled and motivated petroleum engineers will be needed both to increase oil and gas production and perform the subsurface research needed to develop economically viable carbon capture, hydrogen storage and geothermal and nuclear energy power generation, said Stephen Arbogast, director of the Kenan-Flagler Energy Center at the UNC.

“This is not like marketing toothpaste. You are going to have a consequential career,” Arbogast told OGI. “Nothing moves, nothing gets made without energy. And if you want cleaner energy in the future, you’re going to have face the problems that come with it.”

Mature students aware of the potential in energy production are stimulating enrollment in the energy MBA program at UNC, Arbogast said. In addition, the university is developing a strategy for expanding undergraduate offerings, he said. UNC today offers only a limited number of seats for undergraduates in its MBA-level energy classes but is planning an undergraduate program, he said.

“There are companies that want to bring in bright undergraduates and train them internally,” Arbogast said.

Professors and administrators point to U.S. Energy Information Administration projections that the world’s population will grow by 1.8 billion people by 2050, pushing up demand for fossil fuels as well as spurring development of renewables, low-carbon power generation and carbon-capture technologies.

Government-incentivized efforts aimed at slowing climate change have expanded opportunities for energy-development employment without diminishing the need to teach skills needed by the traditional oil and gas industry, said Thomas Bates, an adjunct professor at the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute at Texas Christian.

Diversified options

While TCU’s energy MBA program attracts mid-career professionals who already work in oil, gas and utility roles, significant enrollment growth also is coming from students who aren’t aiming for a job in fossil fuel production, Bates said.

Though the use of fossil fuels is forecast to grow, TCU is seeing some students who “may want nothing do with Chevron or Exxon [Mobil],” he said. Instead, they are interested in joining emerging startups or companies that are developing non-traditional technologies to reduce carbon emissions and provide cleaner energy, he said. TCU has responded by offering a broader selection of courses and training.  

“Energy agnosticism is now a bedrock of our MBA program,” said Bates. “We offer skills training in both traditional oil and gas and in the industries that are developing in the energy economy. If you want solar or wind, we have classes on our menu.”

Marshall Watson, chairman of the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech, said he is confident that the school prepares its students for a career in energy whether they apply their knowledge at traditional E&P operators or startups that are pursuing innovations in subsurface technologies such as geothermal, carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear power.

“Being an engineer is about solving problems,” Watson said. “Any kind of problem.”

The petroleum engineering curriculum at Texas Tech has evolved twice since 2016, a reflection of the continuing changes in technology that are changing how wells are drilled and managed, Watson said. Texas Tech researchers are exploring more efficient ways to produce and store hydrogen as well as work out the technical, legal, social and regulatory details of innovations in carbon capture and produced water management.

The school manages research into the use of horizontal wells to make geothermal energy and build underground systems for hydrogen extraction. Texas Tech announced in July that it is part of a project studying if molten salt can generate electricity economically using water from Permian Basin drilling and production activities.

Like many schools with an engineering tradition, Texas Tech is benefiting from federal grants for low-carbon energy production and is helping students acquire knowledge in emerging technology, Watson said. At the same time, students continue to get intensive, hands-on training in drilling, well management and application of data analysis at the university’s Oilfield Technology Center, a short distance from campus. Part of that training includes an ever-increasing emphasis on data and the processing of data, Watson said.

A flood of available well statistics is driving major changes in how petroleum engineers are trained to manage drilling and production, said Watson and Runar Nygaard, director of the School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering at the University of Oklahoma.

Data driven

In the recent past, standard procedure for engineers working to maximize production from a well was to create physical models of the site and study the chemical and geological makeup of the surrounding rock and soil, Nygaard said. Now they can often rely on computing power alone to analyze data from nearby wells and determine what will work without building a physical model, Nygaard said.

“You will see a production engineer probably collect data from maybe 500 wells” in the area where that engineer is trying to maximize production, Nygaard said. “He will look at commonalities among wells like his own, and instead of doing any physical or chemical modeling of his own well, use a data-driven model based on data from those other wells” as a guide to the best ways to achieve the highest production.

The change has put data analytics classes on every university’s curriculum for energy students, and their importance will grow along with the surging usage of artificial intelligence (AI) computing power and big data collection, administrators say.

Faculty “are using AI and data analytics to help decarbonize chemical processes used in industry,” said Hanchen Huang, dean of the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology at Oklahoma State University, which offers a petroleum engineering minor in its chemical engineering program.

Huang said OSU is developing a degree program, a certificate, and micro credentials in energy engineering and management that will “incorporate management with a technology flavor.”    

Thirty years ago, companies could collect data on a typical well once a month, said Miskimins of the Colorado School of Mines. Now companies can install sensors that can gather billions of bits of data over a well’s lifetime.

The possibilities created by this flood of statistics flowing in real time are so significant that supermajor Chevron funds a Colorado School of Mines program that allows students to minor in energy data management, Miskimins said.

“We have all that data—now what do we do with it?”  Miskimins said. “They can’t just hire a data analytics person. They need a petroleum engineer who understands data analytics or a data analytics person who understands petroleum engineering, or they will get a lot of wrong answers to a lot of their questions.”

Nygaard said the industry is pushing for more emphasis on data instruction and AI because the combination could lead to automation of drilling and production processes. Automation could be the key to bringing down costs to acceptable levels for drilling and operating new wells, he said.

“We’re still way behind other industries in data collection, but it’s changing rapidly,” Nygaard said. “We’re doing much more data collection today than we have ever done.”

Catching up

Nygaard is working on a project now that includes sending him detailed production statistics in real time from a North Sea well, he said.

“I am able to review that data on the cellphone I am talking on at this moment,” Nygaard told OGI. “The sponsors hope the project will provide insight into how they can automate more of the drilling and production processes.”

While federal grants for developing alternatives and carbon capture are welcome, Nygaard said the industry’s need for trained petroleum engineers focused on increasing production will continue to grow.

Over the last four years, the federal government hasn’t shown much interest in investing in research just to increase oil and gas production, Nygaard said.

Yet getting more oil from each well is a problem that the next generation of petroleum engineers will have to tackle, because drilling technology still extracts only a small percentage of the oil and gas in most fields, especially in unconventional sites where fracking technology is not as effective as in shale, Nygaard said.

“Recovery rates are still in the single digits,” he said.

E&P companies will continue to search out the easiest and most economical places to drill, but they are facing questions about how they will extract oil and gas from ever more geologically and logistically challenging fields and wells.

“We are past the low-hanging fruit already. I’d say we are on the medium-hanging now,” Nygaard said.

E&P companies are eager to tap graduates who have studied how to boost production, including those with knowledge that will assist experiments in using methane and CO₂ to push up hydrocarbons in unconventional fields, Nygaard said.

Petroleum engineers will need to reduce the costs of tapping both conventional and unconventional wells and bring their expertise to fields in the Middle East and other locations where even fracking technology over years has not yet been applied in significant ways, Nygaard said.

“Eventually, the world is going to need those hydrocarbons,” Nygaard said.

Oil companies have the connections to find the people they need for exploration and production projects, Miskimins said.

“Energy agnosticism is now a bedrock of our MBA program. We offer skills training in both traditional oil and gas and in the industries that are developing in the energy economy. If you want solar or wind, we have classes on our menu.”
—Thomas Bates, adjunct professor, energy institute, Texas Christian University

Finding funding

Petroleum engineering schools have “incredibly tight” relationships with the private sector, Miskimins said. Private-sector experience and connections are common among all the university administrators leading major petroleum engineer programs, and advisory boards include industry professionals who can help students get the right training and find work when they complete their programs.

Still, recent market conditions have forced companies to be cautious about funding training and research, affecting both the funding and activities of universities with energy-focused programs, Miskimins said.

Where some 90% of research funding came from private industry more than a decade ago, about 65% of support comes from the traditional oil and gas industry today and 35% comes from government and other spending on “energy evolution research into such areas as carbon sequestration, methane emissions reduction and geothermal,” Miskimins said.

Current research efforts may be too heavily weighted toward new types of clean energy production rather than on finding and producing more fossil fuels economically, Miskimins said.

Industry is showing interest in boosting research, Texas A&M’s Blasingame said.

“We are seeing significant interest in research collaborations with the oil and gas industry, with numerous projects and consortia with industry evolving at present,” Blasingame said.

Administrators said one of the major contributions to the push for cleaner energy is finding ways to reduce pollution created by oil and gas production. That includes reducing methane leakage and finding ways to reuse or clean up contaminated water.

“Faculty in petroleum engineering are working with industry partners on EOR methods and to improve exploration and recovery of energy sources in a way that is more sustainable and environmentally friendly,” said OSU’s Huang.

Indicators are that fossil fuel production will be a stronger career choice than first-year students realize when they first arrive at the School of Mines, Miskimins said.

The school is providing energy industry data and forecasts to its students soon after they start classes so they can make better informed decisions about their career paths. Barring an unexpected development, fossil fuels usage is going to remain strong for decades, Miskimins said. “Fossil fuels go from maybe 65% of the (total energy) mix down to about 50% in 2050. So yeah, you lose 15%. But then when people start to realize that oil and gas are still half of it, that seems to get students thinking a little bit more about where most opportunity lies,” Miskimins said.

While fossil fuels are on track to continue to dominate energy production for decades, energy MBA students at TCU will be glad to work for a company that has a vision for helping solve the world’s energy problems, Bates says.

“They know that the biggest challenge of your working lifetime is going to be, how are we going to produce energy and where is the right formula going to come from?” Bates said. “They are super enthusiastic about working toward that goal.”