A Grand Challenge: Education and Advocacy in the New Energy World

_ This is the final article in a series of six on SPE’s Grand Challenges in Energy, formulated as the output of a 2023 workshop held by the SPE Research and Development Technical Section in Austin, Texas. Described in a JPT article last year, each of the challenges are discussed separately in this series: geothermal energy; net-zero operations; improving recovery from tight/shale resources; digital transformation; carbon capture, utilization, and storage; and education and advocacy. _ We have our work cut out for us… but then, we always have in our industry. Following the crippling effects of the oil embargo in 1973, the price of crude oil climbed high and fast to the top of the charts. That increase in crude oil value brought students to petroleum engineering programs in droves around the world. It was not just the crude; it was the value of the degree program. Students rightly saw an opportunity to work in an industry that fueled the engine of the global economy, lit their homes, warmed their food, and moved people around the continents, all reliably and affordably. The post-embargo peak in enrollment was only topped by the peak following the shale boom of the mid-2000s. After the post-embargo boom in the 1980s came the bust. Similarly, many of us were not left standing when the mid-2000 boom busted. The price of oil is climbing again; natural gas and crude oil use is up and consistently so, but the petroleum engineering enrollments are not (Fig. 1). Depending on where you started along the x-axis in your career (Fig. 1), you may already know this story. What’s different now in an industry known to be cyclical, where we’ve seen this before? If higher crude oil prices and concomitant salaries are not bringing in the students, what will? The demand for STEM graduates is high across industries, and it’s particularly acute in the oil and gas sector. The US faces a significant shortage of STEM graduates to meet the needs of critical industries. This scarcity raises concerns about our ability to fill specialized roles, such as petroleum engineering, which are crucial for the energy sector’s development over the next century. If we struggle to produce enough STEM graduates overall, how can we expect to meet the specific demands of the oil and gas industry in the coming decades? There are a few reasons for this new trend. More than half of Americans say that STEM studies are too hard and nearly a quarter believe that STEM studies are not useful for a career. The National Academies have been sounding the alarm for more than 20 years about where we are going technologically, as a nation, and who is going to get us there. Second, within STEM degrees in general, there are fewer petroleum engineering, or equivalent graduates. While additional energy types in the mix have been growing for years, the sharp move toward renewable energy and simultaneously painting hydrocarbons as undesirable is recent.