News

In January of 1977, a young, inspired assistant professor named Gary Pope walked through the doors of the petroleum engineering building. In August of 2019, more than 42 years later, he will retire from UT PGE.

A little less than 30 years after Spindletop started gushing to ignite the Texas oil boom, a small, but significant petroleum engineering department was formed at UT Austin.

Associate Professor Michael Pyrcz

Challenge: In the energy industry we have been working with “big data” for a long time. Our seismic surveys rival the volumes of data acquisition by Google and NASA, but they are highly variable over time and space. 

As a UT PGE student, Hannah Knaup (BSPE ’18) signed up for the longest annual charity bike ride in the world – the Texas 4000.

Hildebrand Department faculty signed a $5 million deal over 10 years with India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC).

The University of Texas System Board of Regents has officially added the Cockrell School of Engineering’s new Energy Engineering Building (EEB) to the Capital Improvement Program, a milestone that signals formal approval to proceed to the final design and planning stage in preparation for the facility’s construction in 2019.

Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

Associate Professor Matt Balhoff joined the UT PGE Department over a decade ago after graduating with a doctoral degree in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University. Since then, he has become a rising star in the petroleum engineering field of enhanced oil recovery - an important discipline for improving oil and gas recovery rates, making the process more efficient. Balhoff shares his latest innovations and challenges as well as the benefits of cross-disciplinary research.

UT PGE remains the No. 1 graduate program in petroleum engineering, according to the 2019 U.S. News & World Report rankings.

UT PGE students swept the 2018 Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Southwest Regional Paper Contest. The competition, held at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge on Feb 22, hosted 13 undergraduate and graduate students in the Southwest region.