The rewards of partnership between academia and the oil and gas industry have historically been so self-evident that the prospect of cooperation through consortia and industry-funded research projects and the like practically sells itself. But, that longstanding alliance has seen some friction in recent years, and this erosion of cooperation is both the result of and an exacerbation of some of the broader challenges facing both industry and academia.
Gretchen M. Gillis, past AAPG president and a geologist with Aramco Americas’ Research and Development Upstream Technical Support Division, said that industry and academia have always worked well together because they knew what was at stake: a promising environment for new graduates and a chance to work alongside industry professionals to find, explore and develop the world’s energy supply.
“Academia supplies talent to the industry and provides long-term, fundamental research with support from industry,” she said.
Between 2010 and 2020, according to a February 2023 study by the think tank Data for Progress, the six top fossil fuel corporations – BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – collectively gave $677 million to 27 universities for research. Such funds are used for recruitment and for projects advantageous to both industry and academia.
Built-In Challenges
There are, of course, challenges that perennially exist in any relationship between industry and academia, owing to their differences in purpose and mission.
“A challenge to many businesses is that investors force them to think about quarterly results and short-term cost pressures rather than the natural timeframe of energy projects, which can be many
months or years,” said Gillis.
For her part, Shaina Kelly, assistant professor of Earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University, believes, “Academic-industry relationships are sometimes challenged by timelines, where the timeline of systematic research progress in academia is often much longer than the solution timeline expected by business unit partners in industry. In addition, part of the nature of research is that there is some meander within project constraints.”
Short-term decisions weighed by the cost of investment rather than the long-term benefits can also produce some friction between the two.
More explicitly, in industry, there is a need for confidentiality, while academia thrives on publishing data.
“The necessity of practical applications for industry research versus the ability in academia to address purely scientific problems” don’t always coexist well, explained Gillis.
At Aramco, she said, there is a winnowing out process before such partnerships are undertaken.
“We are selective about our partners and our activities so that we derive maximum benefit from available funds,” she said.
This selectivity means that Aramco gets to know its partners well and they understand their interests and constraints before embarking on a partnership.
“For example, we need to know that we can rely on our partners to maintain confidentiality when working with our data,” said Gillis.
Kelly believes, like any good relationship, academia and industry must find common ground.
“I found that the most successful relationships were built upon regular engagements (meetings, workshops) and having the academic partners work on samples or datasets that aligned with ongoing industry projects. In that way, the graduate students working on the project were like an extension of the team with unique capabilities, be it specialized instrumentation or modeling skills,” she said.
Anti-Oil Activism, Cultural Stigma
There is, however, considerable friction of late that goes well beyond the differences inherent to academia and industry’s respective missions.
One of the major factors contributing to that friction is the matter of divestiture – the intentional action of moving investment out of the fossil fuel industry. According to Global Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement, more than 1,600 institutions like universities, pension funds and governments that hold more than $40.6 trillion in assets have now divested from fossil fuels. Proponents of such divestiture allege that when the oil and gas industry contributes to university coffers, say, for a study of climate change impacts, there is pressure on schools that receive those funds to tailor their conclusions to the objectives of the fossil fuel industry.
Industry is combatting such moves by highlighting the work it does on clean energy, how divesting will have no real effect on its operations, and by supporting legislation in states that prohibit such divestiture. In Texas, specifically, a new law prohibits the state from contracting with or investing in companies that divest from oil, natural gas and coal companies.
Of more immediate concern to the industry, though, is that fewer students are entering the profession. In the United States, undergraduate geoscience enrollment, which peaked at around 32,000 students in 2015, dropped to 20,000 by 2021.
To combat the new paradigm, Gillis said that both industry and academia have to redouble their efforts to keep the relationship working – and shouldn’t allow the current downward trend in enrollment to thwart a relationship that has worked for decades.
“Both types of organizations should take a long-term view of investments in their relationships,” she said.
She wants to underscore that it is important to keep these numbers in perspective.
“Most cycles in the industry have resulted in fewer geoscientists being employed in the oil and gas industry after a bust,” Gillis noted.
Equally important, she said, is to understand the changing nature of the profession and the language used to define it.
“The American Geosciences Institute, of which AAPG is a member society, tracks the geoscience workforce rigorously,” she said, adding that their projections encompass more than oil and gas employment.
“And the numbers are usually quite large. These projections are a good reminder to geoscientists to remain flexible and adaptable throughout their careers. Industry needs the talent supplied by academia and benefits from long-term, collaborative research programs that complement the more agile research being done,” she added.
The Looming Workforce Problem
At this month’s Unconventional Resources Technology Conference in Houston, Gillis and Kelly, along with Zoya Heidari from the University of Texas, Austin and Katrina Yared of Projeo Corporation will discuss in further detail where the relationship is these days between industry and academia and how best to maneuver the road ahead, while generating a well-prepared workforce.
It is a workforce that needs more workers.
As just one indication of this need: In a 2023 study by the International Energy Agency, by 2040 the world will need to double the mineral requirements for clean energy technologies, which includes electric vehicles and battery storage. If net zero is to be reached by 2050, that would require six times the supply of critical minerals in use today.
One of the more significant obstacles to that goal is that the United States doesn’t have enough industry professionals to get them.
As in, there aren’t enough geologists.
This is both from attrition – roughly 27 percent of the existing geoscience workforce in the United States is expected to retire by 2029, according to the American Geoscience Institute – and the continuing drop in geoscience majors at the nation’s universities. According to AGI’s projections, the country will soon be facing a labor gap of 130,000 full-time geoscientists.
“The workforce problem is serious in that too few people understand that geoscience is an excellent field of study that touches all the major problems that society needs to solve – everything from water and other resources to the environment and hazards,” said Gillis.
Kelly agrees.
“These are dynamic times and the critical skill sets for the subsurface workforce of tomorrow continue to evolve,” she said.
Her hunch, Kelly said, is that future roles will need to integrate classic engineering and geology know-how more than ever.
“These professionals will be faced with many new technologies and will need evaluation skills firmly rooted in the scientific method to evaluate and deploy said technologies,” she said.
As for those enrollment declines, Kelly noted that many incoming students are passionate about the energy transition and it is important for universities to continuously update their programs and messaging “to clearly demonstrate the role of subsurface geoscience in sustainable resource production and carbon management.”
To that end, Gillis wants the industry to improve its message, to better explain the possibilities.
“A geoscience degree does not necessarily lead to a particular job, and some of the jobs are not obvious – for example, evaluating hazards for insurance companies. Geoscientists need to remind prospective geoscience students that the career opportunities that await them are broad and exciting.”