As my colleague Dick Ghiselin mentioned in an earlier column, some of the elected officials in the US know so little about the energy industry that, when an industry exec tried to explain why certain policies flew in the face of the laws of physics, one Congressman purportedly stated, “We write the laws around here.”

Heck, if Congress can rewrite those laws, all our problems are solved. But of course they can’t, and it gets back to an issue that troubles those of us in the biz — why are the people making these laws so utterly uneducated about the industry?

A new minor offering at the Colorado School of Mines promises to effect some positive change in that direction. The “Energy Minor” program aims to educate students not just about the technical aspects of the energy industry but also its economic, political, environmental, and social ramifications.

The school has had such a minor in the past, but the number of prerequisites meant that few students could realistically hope to fulfill the requirements in a four-year stint. So last spring a new approach was suggested. Several departments have come together to create this multidisciplinary offering.

All students will take an “introduction to energy” course and an energy economics course and are then free to pick from three tracks: a fossil energy track, a renewable energy track, or a general track. The final course in the curriculum is a “capstone policy course” that brings the students back together to apply their learnings.

The learning objectives are intended to give engineering students a deeper understanding of the complex role energy technology plays in modern societies.

Objectives include a broad understanding of the scientific, engineering, environmental, economic, and social aspects of energy; a depth and breadth in students’ scientific and engineering understanding of energy technology; and the application of energy science and technology to societal problems requiring economic, scientific, and technical analysis and innovation while working in a multidisciplinary environment. Finally, students should be able to communicate effectively the outcomes of their analyses in written and oral form.

Murray Hitzman, the Charles E. Fogerty Professor of Economic Geology at Mines, said that this is a further move within the school to be sure students graduate with more than just technical skills. “Our students are well-trained in science and engineering, and they go on to become technical leaders,” he said. “But technology skills are not enough these days.”

He added that, as a mining geoscientist, he was able to make a major discovery in Ireland. However, it took a great deal of negotiation with everyone from local landowners to the Catholic Church to get the project off the ground. “I call it ‘gaining social license,’” he said. “You design a project that can benefit everyone.” He noted that the same skillsets are required for many energy projects.

James McNeil, a physics professor at Mines, is the director of the program and said he’s “excited and nervous” about the new minor. Nervous mostly because the introduction to energy being taught by Hitzman this fall was not in the curriculum guide (eight students have signed up anyway). He plans to advertise the new program through as many outlets as possible this semester.

But the faculty are definitely on board. “This required creating five new courses, which adds to the faculty’s workload,” he said. “I worked with five different departments and was pleasantly surprised by the level of interest. They believe in it.”

Each department is tasked with offering one of the classes or tracks. For instance, the physics department will take the renewable track, and the petroleum engineering department will handle the fossil track. And for students who look to a technical career because they don’t think they’ll have to write, “We try to disabuse them of that notion,” he said. In fact, written and oral communication skills will be essential for students hoping to complete the minor. “I can say with dead certainty that this program will be writing-based,” he said.

For more information, visit energyminor.mines.edu.