Rising petrol prices and increasingly difficult-to-extract oil might threaten the US’s car-dependent transportation system, but engineering executives see an even more pressing problem ahead: the need to develop and maintain the nation’s energy infrastructure.

Building an infrastructure that can accommodate both traditional and renewable energy sources — and doing so in the short time frame that’s needed — will be the decade’s most critical engineering challenge, according to a survey of 323 engineering company leaders by the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC).

Given a choice of six potential engineering challenges, 29.9 per cent of respondents identified the top priority as, “The nation must vastly escalate the development of renewable and traditional energy infrastructure to meet future energy needs, decrease the adverse environmental impacts of fossil fuels, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.”

Coming in a close second, with 29 per cent choosing it as the number-one concern, was the need to update the US’s “underfunded and overburdened highways, airports, bridges and transit.”

“This unique survey of top engineering leaders underscores the necessity of putting energy and transportation higher on our national list of priorities,” said David A. Raymond, president and CEO of the ACEC. “The extraordinary fact is that we as a nation are not anywhere close to adequately addressing either of these problems.”

An interesting side note: executives whose companies worked primarily in the South and West of the US were more likely to name energy as the top priority, while those operating in the Northeast and Midwest gave greater weight to transportation.

Other looming engineering challenges, executives believe, include improving the nation’s crumbling water infrastructure (21.8 per cent named this the top priority), securing the social and economic infrastructure from cyber-attacks (10.6 per cent), implementing sustainable building designs and technologies (4.8 per cent) and upgrading the electricity grid and adding smart-grid technologies (4.7 per cent).

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