Roughly the size of a Dollar Tree, the glycol unit at San Jacinto College looks like a shrunken-down chemical plant. It’s where college students like 25-year-old Cole Downs can learn the ins and outs of how a petrochemical plant operates in a safe, life-like environment.
“I’m very hands-on. I learn better when I can do what it is while I’m reading it in the book, which is why I’ve loved the PTEC [process technology] program,” Downs said. “You’re reading about what a distillation column is and here we have one outside that we can go and take a look at.”
The glycol unit is multiple stories tall and contains a series of tanks and tubes for students to learn what it’s really like to work at one of the petrochemical plants located near the campus in Pasadena, Texas, near Houston.
The Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast is a hub for chemical production — it’s where most of the major petrochemicals are produced in the United States. It’s part of a supercluster of advanced manufacturing that is a critical source of “gold-collar” jobs, where six-figure salaries are within reach for those with a 2-year degree.
But succeeding in these jobs requires a unique skill set, including mechanical skills, which have fallen out of vogue in an increasingly digital world.
Seven years since graduating high school, it’s taken Downs trial and error to find his passion. He was a C-average high school student; book learning never quite clicked. He spent years bouncing from job to job and college major to college major — until he found the process technology program.
Cole Downs, 25, is graduating with an associate’s degree in process technology from San Jacinto College in Pasadena, Texas.
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“I found my passion, which is what I always struggled to find,” he said. “If you had told me when I graduated high school that, ‘You’re going to become a plant operator,’ I would have laughed in your face. I did not think I was capable of any of this.”
Downs — who grew with limited exposure to mechanical tasks — is graduating with his associate’s degree in May and already has a job in a local foam plant.
The hands-on learning that helped Downs is integrated throughout San Jacinto College’s process technology program, which teaches students how to operate a chemical plant and the processes involved in mixing chemicals.
As part of the program, students run the glycol unit by themselves at the end of the year and are tested by professors who will simulate failures at the plant to see how students troubleshoot.
“Our instructors are pretty devious,” said Jeff Pearce, education and workforce coordinator for the program. “They’ll walk around and switch valves off, and all of a sudden, the board [says] ‘Hey, we’re losing pressure,’ or ‘We’re gaining pressure.’ And so they send a field operator out to kind of monitor that and check to see what’s going on.”
College students at San Jacinto College in Pasadena, Texas work together on the campus glycol unit during a test run of the facility. Industry recruiters from nearby petrochemical plants observe how students communicate and problem-solve.
Elizabeth Trovall/Marketplace
During the trial run of the glycol unit, industry recruiters observe how students problem-solve and work together to see how they might fit in at a local plant.
“This is a great way for the new generations to come in and get their hands dirty, get hands on stuff,” said Ramon Rodriguez, a trainer with the plastics plant Baystar. “Right now, in the field, you have a lot of the people retiring. So, you have a mix of senior operators in their 60s, and you have a bunch of new ones in their 20s. There’s a couple generational gaps.”
While Gen Z excels at computer and digital skills, he said, their mechanical skills have room for improvement. “The culture is what’s changed a lot.”
He’s sympathetic to young people who haven’t had the opportunity to work with their hands like he did with his father.
“It probably was to save money, but it taught me a lot,” he said. “Taught me how to read a tape measure, how to make a precise cut … measure twice, cut once.”
He understands that many newcomers to the industry, even after graduating from a program like San Jacinto’s, will have to learn more mechanical skills on the job.
For the students who graduate from the program, operator salaries at nearby companies start in the $20 to $30 an hour range and can lead to salaries over $100,000.
And the job market is relatively stable — the world continues to depend on its plastics and chemicals.