Training carbon management engineers: Removing a major hurdle for geologic CO2 storage by increasing educational capacity

Implementing geologic storage of CO2 at a material scale (ca. 1 Gt C/year) will require an industry comparable in size to the current oil and gas industry and a workforce trained in subsurface engineering. Since the same technologies that apply to hydrocarbon production apply to the subsurface storage of CO2, petroleum engineering (PE) graduates will be valuable candidates to work in the carbon storage industry. We expect however that the demand for PEs from the oil and gas industry will increase, and that already strained educational capacity will not be sufficient to supply both industries. Thus we advocate building new targeted educational infrastructure. We present a model curriculum based on an existing accredited multidisciplinary degree program. This program combines the fundamentals of petroleum engineering with the subsurface architecture emphasis of geology and the environmental perspective of hydrogeology. We indicate key elements of this program that could be integrated with other, more traditional undergraduate engineering majors that also deal with the subsurface.