LSU PETE Faculty Awarded More Than $7.5 Million in Grants
12-07-17
LSU Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering faculty Wesley Williams and Mileva Radonjic received more than $7.5 million of the total $10.8 million awarded today by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to projects that address systemic risk in offshore oil and gas operations.
Williams, a professional in residence, received $4,910,000 for his project, “Experiments on Multiphase Flow of Live Muds in a Full-Scale Wellbore With Distributed Sensing for Kick and Gas-in-Riser Detection/Mitigation.” The research is being conducted in cooperation with Texas A&M University and Weatherford.
Radonjic, an associate professor, received $2,614,000 for her project, “Mitigating Risks to Hydrocarbon Release Through Integrative Advanced Materials for Wellbore Plugging and Remediation.” The work is being conducted in cooperation with LSU Petroleum Engineering Assistant Professor Ipsita Gupta, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Texas at Austin and SINTEF, a research company in Norway.
Williams’ project focuses on gaps in understanding about the behavior of riser gas under high temperature and pressure. Testing will be done using an existing well retrofitted with pressure and temperature sensors to produce data for validating and verifying riser gas models that inform design of pressure barriers and techniques for preventing uncontrolled hydrocarbon releases.
“My mission as the LSU PERTT (Petroleum Engineering Research & Technology Transfer) Lab Director was to reinvigorate faculty research in the facility, and with this project, we have, with five LSU Petroleum Engineering professors on the team – myself, Babak Akbari, Mauricio Almeida, Yuanhang Chen and Paulo Waltrich,” Williams said.
“Our goal for this project was to make a permanent piece of infrastructure that the NAS Gulf Research Program could point to as the premier place where large-scale oil and gas research will be performed well into the future. It also will provide a highly-instrumented well and support facility as a ‘playground’ for industry, government and academia to test their equipment and ideas in a safe and controlled environment, something that has rarely existed outside the auspices of large multinational oil and gas operators and service companies.”
Radonjic’s project seeks to advance capabilities for prevention and remediation of
wellbore leakage in offshore hydrocarbon-producing wells. It will develop and test
new materials to improve or replace current ones used in the
plugging and abandonment of wells and develop new methods for placing such materials.
“We want to build the knowledge that Louisiana needs here at home and train and teach
our future engineers to tackle these complex systems of energy and environment that
are important for the economic development of our state,” Radonjic said. “For me,
this is for the people of Louisiana who have contributed to energy production for
decades and deserve that we protect the fragile offshore environment the best we can.”
About the NASEM
The National Academies’ Gulf Research Program is an independent, science-based program
founded in 2013 as part of legal settlements with the companies involved in the 2010
Deepwater Horizon disaster. It seeks to enhance offshore energy system safety and
protect human health and the environment by catalyzing advances in science, practice
and capacity to generate long-term benefits for the Gulf of Mexico region and the
nation. The program has $500 million for use over 30 years to fund grants, fellowships,
and other activities in the areas of research and development, education and training,
and monitoring and synthesis.