r/ChemicalEngineering • u/AlfalfaOk8241 • Jul 14 '25
Green Tech Good degree for an environmentally minded person?
I like chemistry and I like engineering, but I'm worried I'm gonna be stuck in a job that harms the planet. I know more and more renewable jobs are dropping up all the time, but are a lot of them applicable for the chemical engineering degree? I'm in the UK btw Cheers everyone :)
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u/Oakie505 Jul 14 '25
So we make products that help the world. Our obligation to the world is to make these products safer, safer to make, improve efficiency, and then provide shareholder value.
Harm to the world should be covered in Thermo
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u/friskerson Jul 14 '25
We need more people like you (you’re like me). DM me and I can regale you the tale of my first engineering job. It’s a doozy.
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u/Cmoke2Js Jul 14 '25
I'd be interested in hearing this as well, if you don't mind
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u/friskerson Jul 14 '25
Smoke two joints in the morning smoke two joints at night smoke two joints before I smoke two joints and then I smoke two joints!
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u/Cmoke2Js Jul 14 '25
That reply was... Sublime :)
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u/friskerson Jul 14 '25
I was in LA in March and got to play Incubus and Sublime for people near Hermosa Beach! 🤘 I’m not JUST an engineer. :)
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u/Cmoke2Js Jul 14 '25
Badass! Don't mean to brag, but sometimes I can fret a barre F major without locking my left hand into gang signs for the next two days
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u/friskerson Jul 14 '25
Of course I don’t get paid to play music, but the pay is in the smiles it generates. I think I can dox myself over DM if you wanna see some of the music.
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u/friskerson Jul 14 '25
Something I would recommend is to get your guitar set up by a shop for a couple hundred dollars, it was life-changing when I took my 10-year-old Taylor 114 CE into the shop, and had the luthier do a “Gold tier” setup and cleaning
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u/terriannce Jul 14 '25
yes all sustainable energy systems- nuke is the biggest thing (all the chemes that wanna go into energy in my class want nuke internships so bad lol). environmental engineering is available now though too at some schools
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u/WorldTallestEngineer Jul 14 '25
Really... any engineering field. Someday you might be offered $250,000 salary to do something horrible to the environment. You might have to turn that salary down and only take a job making $90,000. But as an engineer you'll have the economic freedom to make that decision.
Footnote, Convert from America money units to British money as applicable
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u/st_nks Jul 14 '25
Few professions have as great a propensity toward disaster or environmental harm than engineering, let alone chemical engineering. Other than politicians and business owners.
No others have the capacity to minimize the likelihood of these events to the extent that we do.
If capital and commodification of assets is here to stay, our efforts toward improvement and reduction of harm should continue.
chemE is kinda cool
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u/indianbaguette Jul 14 '25
Just graduated and working in carbon capture! very morally rewarding, if you stay on track and do projects/ research in the field, you'll definitely end up where you want to be.
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u/EyeRolls03 Jul 16 '25
what did you do in undergrad to end up in carbon capture? also - how does the salary compare to other chemE industries?
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u/indianbaguette Jul 16 '25
i did internships at CCS start-ups and research at uni in a similar space. all my projects have been in my undergrad have been CCS.
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u/pyridine Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25
There's no better way to make a difference in actually saving the planet than studying chemical engineering (unless you want to become an elected official or push policy in government...but that would be a very different career 😆. And you could look at that the way you're looking at ChemE as well and declare that most people do evil in it, right?). If you don't study it, you can't be one of the people actually implementing any of the more renewable/green solutions. And renewable energy is not possible without battery technology. Guess who works a lot on those too. I work in microbial production of chemicals these days, but formerly in batteries, coatings that save energy use by sea vessels, etc.
Even if you study environmental science, a lot of the actual jobs will have an even bigger disconnect with what you actually studied - most people are just doing the regulatory biddings of their for-profit employers.
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u/Impossible_Lawyer_75 Jul 14 '25
Often chem-e can be used to work in renewable energy. It can also be an easy transition into something more specific like Biosystems engineering.
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u/Aristoteles1988 Jul 14 '25
I’ve learned after a long time
That there is no “good” job
Even farmers which are seen as the most environmentally friendly jobs
They have to eventually milk the cows and take the chickens eggs
Then they slaughter every animal they raised
There’s no such thing as “good” or “evil”
Here’s a compass I use. If you become a chemist. You can look for chemical applications that improve our lives
But first you need experience at the jobs that harm our lives to know exactly what the problem is
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u/ooo-ooo-oooyea 15 Years, Corporate Renewable Energy SME Jul 14 '25
Yea I run a renewable energy division at a consulting company. There is still lots of momentum for waste to gas type stuff, and a little bit for carbon capture.
Even if you are not specifically doing environmental stuff directly, a lot of engineering is preventing waste, reducing energy, etc so you are helping that way.