Trends in Academic Research and Graduate Education in Petroleum Engineering Programs

Undergraduate education in Petroleum Engineering (PE) has survived the latest downturn in the industry, and enrollment has started to show an uptick in numbers. Anecdotal evidence, however, has been hinting at a different trend in graduate training and academic research. In this work, the authors collected and analyzed data, on US-based petroleum engineering departments, that included over $137M in external research funding and over 1,900 thesis/dissertations over the span of ten years, in addition to over 1,100 publications from these departments in 2023. The data was analyzed through classification into different categories, including Reservoir/Production, Fracturing, Drilling, Non-Fossil Fuel Geoenergy (geothermal, CCS/CCUS, hydrogen), and Others. The results reveal a drastic shift in research and graduate training that is expected to significantly impact the future of these departments and the workforce they train. The findings show a drop of 70% in external funding supporting oil and gas research over the past ten years, and a growth of 230% in funding for non-fossil fuel topics. This transition is shown to have impacted the topics represented in theses, dissertations, and publications. The findings call for strategic discussions around alignment between the needs and the trajectories in this domain.