Mississippi State University will offer a degree in petroleum engineering under the Dave C. Swalm School of Chemical Engineering.
Jason M. Keith, interim dean and professor, said it will be a four-year degree, and the university expects to enroll twenty-five students per year, resulting in a total of 100 students in the program. 
“There has been a steady growth in the number of students studying engineering, and in particular, petroleum engineering has been the fastest growing engineering major for the last couple of years,” Keith said. “Because of that, we may have a larger overall enrollment.”
In 2013 members of the upper administration expressed interest to reintroducing the PTE degree to the Dave C. Swalm School of Chemical Engineering, Keith said. The growing opportunities in the oil and gas industry within the state increased demand for the program.
“The department undergraduate affairs committee and I worked with a handful of CHE and PTE alumni to develop the curriculum,” Keith said. “We ended up with 12 new courses and the degree program proposal.”
The program required approval from the Chemical Engineering department, from the college and university curriculum committees, levels of the MSU administration and the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, Keith said. This was formally approved by IHL on Nov. 20.
Keith said the addition of petroleum engineering will give MSU students more options for their future. 
“Petroleum engineers study topics such as geology, drilling, reservoir engineering and enhanced oil recovery,” Keith said.
“Petroleum engineers study topics such as geology, drilling, reservoir engineering and enhanced oil recovery and therefore, have more of an emphasis on upstream operations, that is finding oil and gas deposits underground, determining how much is there and estimating the costs for extracting it,” Keith said.
According to Keith, engineering graduates, in particular those with mechanical or chemical engineering degrees, end up with jobs in the oil and gas industry that focus primarily on downstream operations.
“Downstream operations concern refining and processing of the oil into various products, which could be used as fuel for transportation applications or as feedstock for other products,” Keith said.
According to the Chemical Engineering website the PTE program will be effective fall 2015. Students, that are already in engineering programs, especially chemical and mechanical, will have the option to transfer their credits toward the PTE degree. 
The University of Texas at Austin Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering website, one of the top schools for PTE program, describes PTE as use of advanced computers to analyze and simulate reservoir and automate oilfield production and drilling operations. 
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the annual median wage for Petroleum Engineers is $132, 320.
Editor’s note: The lead in this story originally read this is the first time a petroleum degree will be offered at MSU. A petroleum engineering degree was offered in the 1990s. However, this will be the state’s only Petroleum degree offered in fall 2015.