Youthful Energy

If a student aspires to a career in energy, the University of Houston is uniquely positioned to prepare them. With classes in robotics, management, data analytics, engineering, geophysics and more — plus a petroleum engineering program ranked among the nation’s best — UH is the go-to school for energy careers.

Alternatively, if a student hasn’t ever considered a career in energy — if they’re pursuing biology, communications, law or hospitality, for instance — UH is poised to prepare them for a cutting-edge energy sector position that may not have even existed 10 or 15 years ago.

The University’s interdisciplinary energy initiative, UH Energy, provides educators, researchers and students access to the expertise and resources that flow from Houston’s position at the center of the world’s energy economy. The initiative merges disparate voices from industry and academia to help create energy-driven solutions and prepare students from an array of fields for a potential career in energy.

Stephen Greenlee worked for ExxonMobil for nearly four decades as a geoscientist and executive before he joined the University’s Energy Advisory Board, along with an esteemed roster of other energy experts and executives. He initially hesitated. His experience on other university boards had been lackluster, as the institutions seemed to be more singularly focused on decarbonization at that time.

At UH, he found the University was taking an inclusive, global perspective on addressing the most pressing issues facing the industry.

“The Energy Advisory Board would open up these resources in the various companies for the University to go in and get real, tangible, collaborative advice,” Greenlee says. “I was like, ‘Wow. This is the real deal.’”

In Texas, energy is big business. The energy industry employs nearly a million people in the state, fully one-tenth of the nationwide total. Unsurprisingly, Texas produces the most oil and gas of any state. But it also produces the most electricity and wind-powered electricity of any state. Although petroleum and natural gas have long been king in Texas — and particularly in Houston — the economy is expanding to include a more diverse, more innovative approach to the energy sources of the future.

Traditionally, the path to a career at an oil and gas company has started with a technical degree of some sort: engineering, the natural sciences, computers. Eventually, though, the workers who become leaders at those organizations need to master the business side. Whether a company is exploring for oil and gas, managing a nuclear plant or pioneering renewables, its leaders should understand laws, regulations and cultures in addition to hard sciences.

The industry’s ever-growing complexity provides an opportunity for people from different backgrounds to find their place in it. Elizabeth Killinger, another member of the Energy Advisory Board, graduated from UH in 1991 without any expectation of working in energy. During business school, she concentrated in management information systems, which led to a career in consulting. Among other clients, she advised Reliant Energy and eventually ended up working there full-time.

“Through that journey, I realized every single function in a company is important, and energy fuels so much of it,” says Killinger, a section 16 officer and executive vice president of NRG, as well as president of NRG Home and Reliant. “When you’re in college, you can’t imagine it because you haven’t tasted any of that. Through the energy student organizations or even some of the business school organizations, you actually begin to get those experiences.”

Many of the University’s 16 colleges are involved with UH’s interdisciplinary energy initiatives and research, ensuring students like Killinger — who aren’t envisioning a career in energy — will at least gain exposure to the field and have opportunities to grow their knowledge and skills if they change their mind.

“Drill deeper” is no longer the mantra. The largest energy companies on the planet know that increasingly popular (and cheaper) renewable and alternative energy sources are already replacing oil and gas in many use cases. For the world to reach the latest international climate goals — specifically, for the world’s energy production to be net-carbon neutral by 2050 — these companies need to find ways to create and deliver huge amounts of energy that aren’t derived from burning fossil fuels.

The world is in a race against time to imagine and design a modern economy that reduces harmful emissions and doesn’t largely rely on fossil energy sources. And that’s where bright, young minds enter the picture.

Jamie Belinne is the associate dean for career and industry engagement at the C. T. Bauer College of Business, where she teaches a core course for all business majors. In the spring of 2024, the class ran a case competition called “Truth in Energy,” sponsored by ConocoPhillips, in which students competed to create petroleum-free alternatives to existing consumer products, such as tires, paint, toothbrushes, deodorant and more. The students are required to include the financial, environmental and business implications of moving to the replacement they propose in their research.

“It’s not a case of trying to tell the students what’s good, what’s bad, what’s right, what’s wrong,” Belinne says. “But it’s helping them think critically about the challenges we face with trying to create sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based products and the value the petroleum industry does provide to our economy as well.”

The goal of the competition is, in part, to push students to ask the sorts of vital business questions that drive corporate decision-making. It’s the kind of exercise meant to challenge youthful assumptions about how the consumer economy runs. But it’s also a chance for energy companies to identify students capable of creative thinking, rigorous market analysis and disruptive attitudes that may mark the next generation of energy executives.

“The goal of higher education is to get people to think critically about problems,” Belinne says. “Students also come in with no preconceived notions. They have a goal and a dream for what they want the world to be. It’s easier for them to say, ‘Yeah, it’d be hard to change, and it would cost money, but here’s how we might recover those costs and here’s how we could do things differently.’ They’re not as afraid of radical change.”

At UH, institutional support for the energy initiative starts at the top. UH President Renu Khator assembled the Energy Advisory Board 15 years ago with the goal of aligning the University’s energy-related academic programs and research with the evolving needs of industry, complementing one of Houston’s core strengths. The board lends strategic guidance in the areas of upstream, midstream and downstream; alternative energy; and environmental sustainability. Over the years, Khator has engaged regularly and deeply with the board to ensure UH is at the forefront of the critical issues in energy and proactively responsive to changing needs.

The city’s roster of Fortune 500 companies includes heavyweights Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, Equinor, BP, Baker Hughes, NRG Energy, Schlumberger, Halliburton, TXU Energy and a host of others. That translates to an immense amount of reach, know-how and resources for the University to capitalize on — and for students to take advantage of as they hone their own specialties.

With sustained support from industry and University leaders, the UH Energy initiative has a strong presence across disciplines.

“They really work to reach out,” says Margaret Kidd, an instructional associate professor of supply chain and logistics technology in the Cullen College of Engineering. “They’re working with the law school, they’re working with the business school, they’re working with the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. They’re working with the public policy school. They’re truly working across the entire ecosystem.”

Among the ways the University encourages cross-pollination is by sponsoring the Energy Coalition, a 5,000-plus members strong student organization, and by holding competitions. One such event last year, Kidd says, focused on plastics and drew entrants from all corners: roughly one-third engineering students, one-third business students and another third from other disciplines.

There were two dozen teams, all facing off to devise the most innovative and viable solutions to eliminating needless plastics from the economy and the environment. And, as young people do, they had a blast.

“As a professor, you like to have opportunities where you can engage your students,” Kidd says. “They learn, but they also build skill sets, they build networks and just take education in a more holistic direction. About two years ago, we started looking at undergraduate research to channel these things — working as a team, working to solve critical problems. And we’ve found we’ve created this monster. Our students are loving it.”

Once the dust settles, students will be primed to bring that sort of applied ingenuity to corporate and startup jobs wherever they go. A healthy triple bottom line — one that accounts for environmental and human effects, as well as profitability — requires more creativity and diligence than pursuing profit alone. After years of tapping into the resources and thinking of industry minds, UH students will be ready to apply their talents to companies that, more than ever, value exactly that sort of youthful energy.