Formation of professional competencies of future oil and gas engineers taking into account the requirements of environmental safety, energy efficiency and sustainable development

Abstract

The widening of the environmental and climate agenda in the fuel and energy sector has changed the content of the oil and gas engineer's work: alongside production and technological tasks there now stand requirements of environmental safety, energy conservation and the alignment of design decisions with sustainable development goals. Yet the training of future specialists often keeps these requirements at the periphery, framing them as separate courses instead of embedding them into the core of professional competency. The aim of the work was to substantiate a structural and functional model for forming the professional competencies of a future oil and gas engineer, in which environmental, energy-efficiency and sustainability requirements constitute the load-bearing contour of training rather than a superstructure above it. The methodological basis combined a structural and functional analysis of the regulatory framework, conceptual modelling and a comparison of pedagogical approaches. A four-cluster composition of the integrated competency and a three-level scale of its formation, correlated with types of educational and professional situations, are proposed. It is established that the robustness of professional action is achieved by transferring the environmental and energy criterion into the engineering calculation itself, whereas moving it into a separate evaluation block reproduces the gap between theory and practice. With such a transfer, the environmental and project-based approaches yield gains in formation where the activity-based approach exhausts its possibilities. The resulting model refines the understanding of an engineer's professional competency as the ability to hold the technological, environmental and resource criteria within a single design decision.