what is special about university of texas at austin and especially petroleum department over there???

Answer 1

The university has an enormous amount of money from the state and Austin is a great town.

Their petroleum engineering department benefits from the fact that the industry supports the school -- and the industry is there.

This is the same reason why UC Davis has a great vintner program (it is near California's wine country), why University of Wisconsin at Appleton has a great paper chemistry program (Appleton is the Toilet Paper capital of the world) and why UNLV's Hotel & Restaurant school is the only decent program in the university.