Given Agency

With hands-on placements and a new graduate scheme, the Environment Agency is giving chemical engineering students real-world experience – and a clearer sense of how their degrees make a difference, writes Sam Baker

BEFORE applying for the Environment Agency’s undergraduate placement scheme for chemical engineering students, Abbey Addison says she “didn’t even know the Environment Agency would need engineers”. “When people think of the Environment Agency, they think of flood defences or parks,” she says.

Eight months into her 12 months with the agency, a placement sandwiched between her second and third years at Loughborough University, Addison has been surprised by the diversity of work there. “It’s nice to see all the different things that can be linked using chemical engineering,” she says, having worked on regulations for an array of industries, from oat processing plants to polymer manufacturers.

Addison’s first four months were mostly desk-based for the National Permitting Service, writing mandatory environmental permits that outline the specific measures to which a plant must adhere to protect the environment.

Her second four months involved far more working on the ground, including site inspections and monitoring whether companies were obeying their permits.

Addison says that engineers “play a key role” in the Environment Agency, and that they have a “deeper understanding of the risks” inherent to process industries. One of her projects involved visiting a manufacturer of polymers used to make paint to evaluate how they would mitigate and respond to leaks. As an engineer, she felt well placed to ask questions like “why are you doing this as a batch reaction”, or “why have you put this alarm here”, as well as being able to understand the response.

For Addison, though, questioning companies about their industrial processes is less about interrogation and more about learning. When explaining their processes, she says companies often tailor their responses to clearly reflect the theory she has learned in university lectures.

“Everyone has been very friendly because they know I’m an intern and they know I’m a chemical engineer and wanting to understand,” she says. “It brings more understanding of what my university degree is when I actually get hired.” In fact,

Addison now believes that industrial placements should be a requirement of the standard chemical engineering university syllabus. “Without going on this placement, I wouldn’t actually get an understanding of how my degree would be implemented in the real world.”

Nearing the end of the placement, Addison feels she has a “good understanding of how sustainability and environmental protection play a key role within chemical engineering”. So, would she ever go into the fossil fuel industry after graduating? It’s unlikely – “I don’t find it interesting!” she says.

Impressing the cynics

The last decade has been difficult for the Environment Agency. Analysis by the Prospect trade union in 2022 found that the agency had suffered a real-term budget cut of 50% since 2009.

Furthermore, at the time of Prospect’s report, the agency wasn’t even managing to fill 25% of advertised job vacancies. The increasing number of older engineers taking early retirement only added to the agency’s woes.

There are signs of improvement, however, particularly in engineering recruitment, driven not only by a 9% budget increase in March, but thanks to the newly established graduate programmes.

After a “brain drain” at the agency, senior advisor Ed Barnard set up the undergraduate placement programme – “Traditional recruitment processes just [weren’t] bringing in the next generation of chemical engineers”.

With a tight budget, Barnard looked at the cheaper option of employing graduates. Having “impressed the cynics” with the first two years of the undergraduate placement programme, the agency launched a four-year graduate scheme which took on its first intake in September 2024. Barnard says the university placement is working favourably for staff retention and is “starting to bring in some chemical engineers that we wouldn’t otherwise have had” in full-time positions. He says that two undergraduates on placements now have secured full-time jobs at the Environment Agency for when they finish university.

“Without going on this placement, I wouldn’t actually get an understanding of how my degree would be implemented in the real world.” Abbey Addison

Influencing change

One of the initial cohort of young engineers at the agency is Patrick Zheng, who graduated from the University of Sheffield with a master’s last year. “A lot of people in my generation are quite passionate about influencing change when it comes to the environment and climate change,” he says.

As with the undergraduate placements, graduates like Zheng begin in a desk-based role in the National Permitting Service. “Essentially, I’m reviewing and determining applications from a variety of different sectors.” Over the course of the four-year scheme he will move around different teams, ultimately working towards IChemE chartership.

Engineers at the Environment Agency work across all process industries, “evaluating the potential environmental impacts of these industrial operations, and subsequently implementing control and monitoring requirements to ensure that we protect ecosystems as well as human health”.

One of Zheng’s current projects is bp and Equinor’s joint Net Zero Teesside development. The proposal is to produce blue hydrogen, capture the emissions from the process and store them offshore in the North Sea. Zheng’s role on the permitting team is “air quality lead”, evaluating the environmental impact from particulates, nitrous oxide emissions and CO2 venting.

“One quite important consideration is that this CCS process is operating what is called a process capture CO2 configuration,” Zheng says. This means that the concentration of CO2 is much higher than in the “post-combustion configuration” of CCS. If the higher concentration CO2 were to be vented, “that is something we need to consider in terms of implications to the environment and human health”.

Putting his degree into practice at the Environment Agency has been a running theme of the work so far, Zheng says, and he appreciates that “there’s a strong emphasis on development, as opposed to delivery”. The Teesside project has been especially gratifying for him, as the process that bp and Equinor have proposed is similar to one he designed in his master’s dissertation project, using the same amine solvent in their CO2 absorption column as Zheng proposed in his final-year design project.

Being able to see the same design choice being applied has been a big confidence boost. “I wasn’t too sure about my decision at the time, but I guess this vindicates how I justified that.”

The likes of bp and Equinor remain attractive places for chemical engineering graduates to start their careers, and Barnard isn’t naive to the challenge of the Environment Agency competing with the oil giants. “Chemical engineering attracts a good salary, which the public sector can struggle to match for many of our roles,” he says.

“This is why I believe that having an accredited graduate scheme will add value to our employment offer…that makes the Environment Agency a rewarding place to work.”

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For more information about placements and graduate training schemes at the Environment Agency: https://bit.ly/ea-early-careers