BATON ROUGE, La., Feb. 01, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Last fall, LSU’s Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering became the first in the country to offer a formal concentration in carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). While other institutions are also adding courses, tracks, or certificates related to this topic, Louisiana’s position at or near the epicenter of carbon capture and storage activity adds to the opportunities available to LSU students.
“Because Louisiana is one of the prime locations in the world to perform industrial-scale CCUS, many of our existing corporate partners have expressed interest in collaborations with LSU related to CCUS research and education,” said Karsten Thompson, chair and professor in the LSU Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering. “[Students] can join a low-carbon solutions or CCS unit of a company and hit the ground running. We have talked to our recent grads who have moved into those units, and they emphasize how much they have had to learn about topics such as geochemistry, monitoring, and economics of the CCS operations. The classes in our concentration will give future students an excellent head start.”
Currently, 17 students are enrolled in the concentration, with four expected to graduate in May. The concentration consists of courses in the fundamentals of CCUS, underground geological storage, natural gas engineering, and geology or geophysics, among others. The total number of credit hours required is 17.
The department also offers elective courses for students interested in other topics, such as oil and gas production from shales, advanced drilling engineering, data analytics, etc. The new CCUS concentration is the latest solutions-focused investment by LSU to advance energy innovation, complementing and extending the impact of cross-disciplinary initiatives like the LSU Institute for Energy Innovation.
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