Hi Ash96,

Petroleum engineering (PE) and Petroleum geoscience (PGS) are different and similar at the same time.
(i) PE - you get BEng. PGS - you get BSc (refer to my post above for more clarification)
(ii) In Oil & Gas terms (since we're discussing about PE which basically works in OnG field only), PGS's job is to analyze and predict the source of energy (natural gas, fossil fuel, etc.) through various methods - seismic, sonar, sound waves, and many more which I can't name them. On the other hand, PE's job is to analyze how they should dig out the energy sources - they will be dealing with fluid flows, fluid mechanics, basic structural design, etc.
(iii) If you are worried about starting pay, both of them have the same starting pay potential IF you are in the OnG field. Their job scopes are also quite limited.

Edit: Forgotten to add in some similarities. They share a lot of courses together (geology, petroleum economics, some maths subjects and core subjects which are learned in 1st and 2nd year, etc.) and they also have some common grounds in doing cross-course projects such as Exploration and Production (some final year thingy, not too sure about that).

About R&D and designing.. I believe that most undergraduate programmes does not require much R&D and stuff. You can venture more into it when you are doing your masters.

Getting into UTP and getting PETRONAS's sponsorship are two different matter. I hope you are aware of that. In recent years UTP has been recruiting quite a number of new intakes since we are now heading towards the direction of a research university.

Hope to see you there!

There are around 500 new intakes every semester (might be off - long time din catch up with freshies). It used to be around 180 during my time. Whether getting into UTP is easy or not is quite dependent on how you performed during your interview and also luck - which is kind of subjective.
sponsorship is kinda hard to get recently. I've only heard of a handful of students on petronas sponsorship among the new batches.