This integrative professional master’s program will draw upon faculty and course offerings across multiple departments within engineering and natural sciences to address future energy challenges. The consensus recognition of climate change, extreme weather events, and still-growing carbon dioxide emissions is leading to irreversible shifts in how we generate and use energy, chemicals, and materials sustainably, while managing and lowering the impact of greenhouse gases in the environment. Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, geothermal energy, H2 production/storage, carbon capture and sequestration are all ways to generate global energy supply and to reduce emissions.
This program will provide the skill set for scientists and engineers to apply their transferrable skills to the search for new energy sources, to develop new technologies to harness, store, and utilize this energy and to recover and remove the products of energy usage, and to design sustainable systems for the long term.
The workforce that will take on this task must be developed and trained in foundational and applied skills to address these challenges. Rice University is poised to lead in this domain, given its well-established expertise in materials science, energy technologies, energy systems, subsurface geoscience, and environmental research.
Program Learning Outcomes for the METS Degree
Upon completing the METS Degree, students will be able to:
- Explain the interconnections among Earth, Energy, and Environmental Systems and impacts on society.
- Evaluate controls on global and regional energy supply and demand and the flow of energy and money across the energy value chain.
- Identify and select technical (engineering) solutions to energy problems
- Develop and apply technical, quantitative, and practical skills for the production, storage, deployment, and use of energy resources in sustainable ways.
- Conduct integrated, interdisciplinary team-based research on energy systems, and communicate this understanding to the general public