Administrators at Laredo Community College (LCC) are looking into spending several million dollars to buy real-life equipment used in the industry in an attempt to give a more hands-on education.
Oil and gas may have slowed down in the last six months, but the director of the oil and gas program says the industry always needs highly skilled technicians. Orlando Zepeda is the chief officer of the oil and gas program.
Recently, he brought the students to a shell training facility in Louisiana where they could tour the storage and process facilities work in a non-volatile, non-dangerous environment. They were able to see specific components and better understand how they work such as valves and tanks that separate oil from water. He says students can benefit from bringing in millions more in equipment. The college right now has many of those individual components that you might find in the oil and gas industry. But they want to connect them all together so that students have a more hands-on experience because that’s the way you learn to be a good technician. Students would be learning on a replica gas well, a replica oil well. They’d learn to remove water from what they produce, and would practice operating a model pipeline.