Development of a Special Topics Course on Civil Engineering Project Finance for the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering of Texas A&M University (UTCM 10-22-49)

Experts predict that the highway trust fund will deteriorate rapidly over the course of the next several years. This situation has led many state agencies to seek alternative financing methods that can meet both social and economic needs. One possible solution to the problem is to partner with the private sector and together, utilizing project finance methods, deliver facilities. This innovative approach has only recently found new applications in delivering transportation infrastructure. This trend is likely to increase in the near future. Because it has been widely adopted in other infrastructure sectors, mainly for delivering power plants, major pipelines, etc., many valuable cases and lessons learned can be brought to the transportation arena. Nevertheless, very few, if any, of the educational programs in the country have a project finance course integrated into the core curriculum for graduate civil engineering students. Even fewer programs treat project finance as a truly interdisciplinary topic. In fact, the topic of project finance often constitutes only a small part of the structured finance curricula. The purpose of this project was to bridge this gap by developing educational and teaching materials for an interdisciplinary course in project finance. This course communicates the implications of financial decisions on engineering choices and vice versa. The course is directed toward graduate students at the Master of Science level to better prepare them to deal with real-world transportation financing.