US College Students Are Shunning Oil-Industry Degrees for ESG Future

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Scott Lindberg’s dream of becoming a petroleum engineer was fueled by childhood drives through Texas oil country with his energy-consultant father, passing pumpjacks and pipeline hubs that kept the world’s biggest economy humming.

But after recently graduating with honors from the University of Texas at Austin with a petroleum-engineering degree, Lindberg is turning his back on the oil industry and plans to attend law school instead. His disenchantment is rooted in concern that fossil fuels may not have much of a future given increasing pressure from politicians, activists and investors to pivot toward more climate-friendly energy sources.

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This year, the number of new petroleum-engineering graduates in the US is expected to total about 400 -- an 83% decline from 2017, when they peaked at more than 2,300, according to Lloyd Heinze, a Texas Tech University professor who tracks annual enrollments at more than three dozen petroleum schools around the world.

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Historically, however, petroleum schools have seen influxes of new students when oil booms and the sector goes on hiring sprees. But with US crude up more than 30% so far this year, the link appears to be broken.

“Personally, I think we are heading to a bit of a crisis,” said Jennifer Miskimins, who leads the petroleum-engineering department at the Colorado School of Mines, one of the world’s premier oil universities. “As petroleum engineers age, the industry will need to replace a retiring cohort of Baby Boomers. But we are not seeing enough petroleum engineers to fill the demand.”

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The reason why enrollment numbers no longer correlate with oil prices, according to Colorado School of Mines’s Miskimins, is partly due to the energy transition. More students and parents are turned off by the sector not necessarily because they are environmental advocates, but because they have concluded the switch will make oil and natural gas obsolete in five or 10 years, she said.

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“We always tell students in their first lesson, you are entering a super cyclical industry, and you need to be prepared for that,” Miskimins said.

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It's already been noted across the industry that the COIVD 2020 downturn motivated quite a bit of elder field experienced folks to just retire early from the industry. This has become one of the challenges with ramping up to try to match the step increase in demand coming out of the government-forced lockdowns/shutdowns.

I have seen, in my time, folks from Petroleum, Mechanical and Chemical engineering degree backgrounds being able to cross over into each others' "disciplines" within the industry. However, obviously each of the three at least being out of college with a knowledge base that's a bit different from each other, but the oil & gas and petrochemical industries are fast-learning and adapt type fields. I do wonder if those that are opting not to pursue PE or simply just doing mechanical or chemical in college, with a mind that they may still very well end up working for a Valero, Exxon, Devon, etc. upon graduating.