The objective of this project was advance the state of the art and knowledge in chemical dispersant use when injected into a subsea oil, or oil and gas, release.
The project was accomplished in a series of tasks, as described below.
This project addressed the operational performance of subsurface injection of dispersants into deepwater blowouts by developing methods focused on oil transport after dispersant injection by researching the following:
The objective of this project is to use existing, novel equipment for obtaining fundamental, crosscutting chemical, physical, and hydrodynamic information on fluids that could be released and transported from deep, subsea hydrocarbon reservoirs and inadvertently released into a deepwater environment. Specifically, the research will use the resulting fundamental information in numerical, thermodynamic, and plume models to comprehensively describe potential roles and impacts of gas hydrates in such a scenario. The goal is to have a comprehensive understanding of:
There has been increasing shift to use BioFuels (bio-diesels, and gasoline/ethanol blends) in the worldwide marketplace. The different physical and chemical properties of these products in comparison to the petroleum products they are replacing leads to the issue of response countermeasure actions in the event of a BioFuel spill.
This project aimed to validate and improve the two correlation models using a well know oil spill model OILMAP, by adding crude oils from outside the GOM for which physical and chemical properties are available, introducing ten new crude oils from the GOM for which physical and chemical properties were measured in this study, considering existing data from large tank tests and field trials/spills, and using data from new small tank tests.
Planned wind projects on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf could consist of wind turbine generators connected to a centralized electrical service platform (ESP). The ESP could contain approximately 40,000 gallons of dielectric insulating oil and approximately 2,000 gallons of assorted oil-based fluids (diesel fuel, lubricating oils, etc.) stored on site for facility maintenance. In addition, each wind turbines could have several hundred gallons of lubricating fluid.
The objective of this research was to develop best-fit correlations between readily available fresh oil properties and the window of opportunity for successful chemical dispersant use on Gulf of Mexico crude oils.
The goals of the work were to:
This research project will assess the feasibility of a marine oil spill countermeasure strategy based on the stimulation of oil-mineral aggregate (OMA) formation. Experiments will be conducted on both laboratory and wave tank systems under controlled conditions to evaluate its potential effectiveness for the treatment of oil spills from ships, facilities or pipelines. Conceptual mathematical models will be developed from the data to identify the fundamental processes affecting operational effectiveness as a means to provide guidance for field operations.
Proposal focuses on the design and implementation of a field spill in Svalbard, Norway in March 2006, where several remote sensing systems will be tested in both surface and airborne modes. Experiment will be conducted over solid land fast sea ice representative of the type of ice found in many near shore Arctic regions of the world including the Alaskan North Slope.
Experiments were conducted in 2002 and 2003 at Ohmsett The National Oil Spill Response Test Facility to assess the dispersibility of fresh and weathered Alaskan and Canadian crude oils in very cold water. Results from these experiments indicate that the crude oils tested were dispersible at near freezing water temperatures. However, there has been criticism of the findings related to the heating of the viscous oils prior to discharge onto the waters surface and subsequent dispersant application.
