UT is America’s Preeminent Energy University

Hop on Highway 87 and drive about six hours northwest of Austin, and you’ll find yourself in a large, unassuming patch of desert that stretches about 250 miles from Midland to El Paso. This area is known as the Permian Basin. While it may not look like much to the untrained eye, it is one of the most energy rich regions in the world—and may hold the key to the United States’ energy future.  

Best known for being one of the birthplaces of the early-20th-century Texan oil boom, the Permian has evolved significantly since the first roughnecks started drilling for black gold. This region was the vanguard of the fracking revolution that unlocked vast reservoirs of natural gas starting in the early 2000s, turning the United States into the largest exporter of liquified natural gas in the world.  

The oil and gas pumped from the Permian is a critical input to our modern lives and economic prosperity in Texas and across the US. This also, of course, makes it a meaningful contributor to the atmospheric greenhouse gases that are a key driver of climate change.  

Today, the world is racing to transition to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, but oil and gas aren’t going away anytime soon. Countless studies have shown the important role that fossil fuels must continue to play to support domestic and global economic development—but that doesn’t mean that the old ways of producing, transporting, and using fossil fuels wouldn’t benefit from a 21st century upgrade.  

Unlike the growing number of American research universities that have completely divested from the oil and gas industry, UT researchers are doubling down on their industry collaborations to help them reduce emissions and usher in an era of energy abundance where conventional and new energy sources coexist.

From Hydrogen to Hydrocarbons

For the past three years, UT chemical engineering professor Brian Korgel has led UT’s Energy Institute, a research center that consists of more than 400 researchers from across the Forty Acres who are focused on the most pressing science, technology, and policy questions related to the global energy transition. Korgel’s own research is largely focused on nanomaterial chemistry for renewable energy technologies such as solar cells, batteries, and hydrogen fuel cells. And as the director of the Energy Institute, he has helped spearhead a project known as the Permian Energy Development Lab (PEDL), which is a part of the National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovations Engines Program and is designed to help the Permian Basin expand its energy portfolio while simultaneously reducing emissions.

“There’s an explosion of new energy technologies [such as] clean hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, geothermal, and nuclear that are coming online right now,” Korgel says. “We’re thinking about the energy future for the Permian Basin region by trying to increase the speed of innovation, business creation, and ultimately, economic development.”

Launched in spring 2023, PEDL has brought together companies from the oil and gas and renewable energy industries, the Department of Energy, and various philanthropic organizations to support research dedicated to improving existing oil and gas operations in the Permian, workforce development for renewable energy, and educating students about advanced energy technologies.

In addition to helping a region that is virtually synonymous with the oil and gas industry to establish itself as a leader in renewable energy production, Korgel and his colleagues at UT’s Energy Center are also working closely with major oil and gas producers to commercialize clean hydrogen—a perennially futuristic renewable energy technology whose time appears to have finally come.

Hydrogen can be used as a substitute for many applications that typically require fossil fuels such as transportation and industrial heating. The problem, however, is that the typical way of making hydrogen requires “cracking” methane—a potent greenhouse gas—which produces about 10 times as much carbon dioxide for every kilogram of hydrogen.  

The good news is that it is possible to produce clean hydrogen by using electricity to split water atoms, which produces hydrogen and oxygen. The key is to make sure the electricity used to split water molecules comes from a sustainable energy source. Alternatively, it’s possible to continue to make hydrogen from natural gas and safely capture the CO2 emissions so that they can be stored in the ground or put to productive use. “Both of these technologies exist today,” Korgel says. “The challenge is that they’re still relatively expensive.”

In November, UT was tapped as the academic lead for the HyVelocity Hydrogen Hub, one of seven hydrogen hubs the Department of Energy (DOE) established to help accelerate the commercialization of clean hydrogen technologies. The UT hub is currently managed by Korgel and his colleagues at the Energy Institute and is backed by a $1.2 billion grant from the DOE. Over the next 10 years, that sum will be matched by several major industry partners in the hub including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Air Liquide, who will work alongside UT’s Energy Institute and a broad consortium of industry, academic, and government stakeholders to develop technologies that lower the cost of clean hydrogen production and use.

“The whole point of the hydrogen hub is to de-risk clean hydrogen projects because they’re very capital-intensive,” Korgel says. “The idea is that with a bit of government investment to offset the risk of clean hydrogen production, you’ll be able to create enough clean hydrogen to create a market for it, and once there’s a market for it, you’ll have more demand for clean hydrogen, and you’ll see more of these projects come to fruition.”

But before these markets can develop, there’s also plenty of work to be done on the demand side, says Korgel. Hydrogen fuel cells, for example, are effectively large batteries that can convert hydrogen into electricity without burning it. They are used to power hydrogen vehicles as well as to balance the electric grid by producing electricity from hydrogen during times of high demand, such as brutal Texas summers or shock freezes.

Today, several problems plague hydrogen fuel cells that make them too expensive or inefficient for widespread use. One of the most common types of fuel cell pumps hydrogen into the cell’s chamber, where a catalyst breaks the gas into protons. The protons then diffuse across a membrane into another chamber, where they bind with oxygen. Those membranes are typically made from pricey materials such as platinum, and the membranes “leak” hydrogen into the oxygen chamber, which significantly reduces the efficiency of the fuel cell.

To solve this problem, Korgel and his colleagues are developing 2D materials—atomically thin layers of inorganic materials such as graphene—to create new membranes that limit the crossover of hydrogen and oxygen in fuel cells. Their research benefits from cross-pollination of ideas at the Hydrogen Hub with industry giants that have decades of experience working with scalable fuel technologies.

Data Dump

Developing scalable and cost-effective new energy technologies is only part of the solution. To balance the ever-growing need for energy with competing demands to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible, UT researchers are also collaborating with oil and gas producers to help reduce the emissions from currently existing systems.

Although carbon dioxide gets most of the attention when it comes to our global warming challenges, one of the fastest ways to make the biggest impact on greenhouse gas emissions is by targeting unintentional methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. Unlike carbon dioxide, which can persist in the atmosphere for decades, methane—which accounts for virtually all purchased natural gas—is a relatively short-lived greenhouse gas that only lasts for a decade or so in the atmosphere before breaking down into carbon dioxide. But during the relatively short time it’s aloft, it can produce some heavy damage: Over the course of two decades, a single kilogram of methane will produce the equivalent amount of warming as 80 kilograms of CO2.

“Methane contributes about a third of the warming we’re experiencing today,” chemical engineering professor David Allen says. About 20 percent of the methane in the atmosphere is emissions from the global energy sector. Unlike natural causes and agriculture, which approximately evenly contribute the remainder of atmospheric methane, Allen sees this as the low-hanging fruit for reducing methane emissions quickly and cost-effectively.

“It’s going to be really hard to change the world’s diet away from meat and rice in the short term, which are the major drivers of agricultural methane production,” Allen says. “But if we can get emissions from the global energy sector to near zero by 2030, that would be the warming equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road. That’s the scale of the prize.”

The vast majority of methane emissions from the oil and gas industry are the result of equipment malfunctions such as stuck valves or broken seals that are relatively easy to fix, but devilishly hard to locate. From the time natural gas is pulled from the ground in, say, the Permian Basin, to the time it is burned by the end user, it may pass through thousands of miles of pipelines, a processing plant, several compressor stations, power plants, a liquefaction terminal, and a ship, all of which may accidentally leak methane into the atmosphere.

Even if oil and gas companies didn’t care about climate change, it’s in their interest to reduce methane emissions because every emission represents lost product. In fact, Allen and his colleagues have estimated that about 2 percent of all natural gas is lost to unintentional emissions, which represents billions of dollars in lost product. The International Energy Agency calculated that about half of global methane emissions from the energy sector could be reduced at zero net cost because the value of the reclaimed gas outweighs the cost of repairs. The problem isn’t a lack of industry interest or technical challenges in fixing the source of the emissions—it’s finding them in the first place.

About a decade ago, while still the head of UT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Resources (CEER), a position he held for 25 years, Allen helped pioneer methane measurement technologies that ranged from fixed-point sensors on the ground to drone and satellite-based techniques, which could provide methane measurements from hyperlocal to continental scales. “Finding methane leaks after they’ve happened has been the focus up until now, and UT is unquestionably the global leader at this,” Allen says. “But where we really want to get to is predicting and preventing them before they occur.”

This is where UT’s new Center for Energy and Environmental Systems Analyses (CEESA), co-directed by Allen and professor Arvind Ravikumar, comes in. Recently spun out from CEER, the new center is home to about 50 researchers, many of whom are researching ways to synthesize methane emissions data across multiple physical and temporal scales.

“A decade ago, we didn’t have any measurements,” Allen says. “Now we’re drowning in data—we have terabytes of it coming in from all these different sources, and we need a way to synthesize it all [in a way] that is relevant to the global marketplace.” This, he says, is the first step toward using new technologies such as artificial intelligence to predict and prevent unintentional methane emissions before they happen.

The work of Allen, Ravikumar, and their colleagues at CEESA also has immediate practical relevance for the US oil and gas industry, which must compete in a global market that is increasingly demanding accurate accounting of the carbon footprint of natural gas and other goods. This requires unprecedented visibility into the emissions footprint of the entire supply chain, from drill hole to burn tip.  

“Supply chains are incredibly complex,” Ravikumar says. “The gas that gets burned at a power plant in Texas might have come from 3,000 miles away in Pennsylvania. Between extraction and end-use, it travels through thousands of miles of pipelines and dozens of compressor stations—each a potential source of emissions.”  

This complexity creates unique challenges for measurement and verification. Different technologies work better at different scales: Satellites, for example, can report methane emissions at continental scales, but struggle to pinpoint the exact location of leaks. Ground-based sensors, by contrast, offer precision local measurements, but limited range. The problem is further compounded by the temporal nature of methane emissions—the leak rate may vary dramatically over time, which won’t be captured by intermittent snapshots. The result, Ravikumar says, is that methane emissions have been significantly underestimated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other climate organizations for decades.  

Getting a more accurate read on methane emissions is hardly a theoretical concern for the oil and gas producers in Texas and across the United States that must compete in a global marketplace that is implementing increasingly strict emissions standards on natural gas and other products. The European Union, for example, has added new methane standards that will affect natural gas imports starting in 2027. Japan, Korea, and other major gas importers are establishing similar requirements. If American oil and gas companies want to stay competitive, they’ll need to be able to both accurately account for emissions across their entire supply chain and reduce them as much as possible.  

“The global natural gas marketplace is about to fragment into high-value, low-emission gas and low-value, high-emission gas,” Allen says. “Which one do you think you’ll want to be selling?”  

In addition to helping domestic oil and gas producers adapt to the changing global market by reducing and accounting for their methane emissions, Allen and Ravikumar are also using UT’s expertise in methane detection and measurement to establish frameworks that will shape the future of global energy trade. Today, Allen, Ravikumar, and several colleagues at UT serve as technical advisors to both United Nations and U.S. Department of Energy initiatives aimed at creating standardized systems for measuring and reporting methane emissions across international supply chains.  

“This isn’t just an academic exercise,” Ravikumar says. “These measurements and frameworks are becoming essential for everything from tax credits for clean hydrogen to carbon border adjustments for international trade. Getting these numbers right matters for policy, for markets, and, ultimately, for our climate.”  

The stakes are particularly high in Texas, where different production regions show stark contrasts in emission rates. The Haynesville region in East Texas, which produces primarily natural gas, has emission rates around 0.1 percent. The Permian Basin, producing both oil and gas, sees rates closer to 4 percent—a forty-fold difference that demonstrates both the challenge and opportunity for improvement.  

The good news, Allen says, is that it’s hard to imagine a university more equipped for this monumental challenge than UT. “What you really need for these systems to be successful today is operational data,” Allen says. “If you’re looking down from a satellite and you don’t have any of that data, you’re going to be at a huge disadvantage. Our ability to partner with groups as diverse as ExxonMobil, the United Nations, and the Environmental Defense Fund right in our backyard is what really allows us to make these advances that are having a global impact.”

All Hands on Deck  

The US and global energy system is a tightly woven mesh of policies and technologies, requiring interdisciplinary approaches to examine each individual challenge in the context of the whole. Clean hydrogen, for example, doesn’t just require cheaper and more efficient catalysts; it also requires more efficient ways to generate solar electricity and policies that spur downstream demand for the final product. Reducing methane emissions is as much an engineering problem as it is a data science and policy problem.

The uniqueness and impact of UT’s energy research stems from its comprehensive approach to our biggest energy challenges. At the Energy Institute, UT faculty focused on reducing carbon emissions in the oil and gas industry work side-by-side with researchers innovating in batteries, solar electricity, and geothermal energy. Together, they are working with local, national, and global policymakers to develop more sustainable and resilient energy infrastructure. What starts here will prevent blackouts like the one that swept across Texas in 2021, create emissions monitoring and reporting frameworks, and drive down the cost of the energy we all depend on every day.  

UT has always been endowed with a deeply ingrained sense of responsibility for ensuring that all innovation at the University is sustainable and drives real-world impact. In 2024, UT launched the Year of AI, building on more than 50 years of research to find new applications for this technology in sectors ranging from healthcare to education. Similarly, UT has been a leader in energy innovation for decades, but this year the university is doubling down on its commitment to transforming the way we produce and use our energy resources. 2025 can’t be called the “Year of Energy” at UT. Rather, it’s the birth year of America’s preeminent Energy University.

CREDITS: Illustration by Deena So’Oteh; photo courtesy of the Jackson School of Geosciences