From Cement to Ocean Current Modeling, Iowa State Engineers Offer Oil Spill Insights

Newswise — Three Iowa State University engineers—one drawing on hands-on experience and the others applying theory, mathematics, and computational modeling—offer a detailed look into how the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico may have begun, and how planners can prepare to minimize the effects of any future spills.

Watch the video: http://www.eng.iastate.edu/oilspill.html

Cement expert questions judgment, not technology

Bob Steffes knows about deepwater oil rigs and he knows about cement, and even though he doesn’t yet know all the details about what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, this much seems likely: in an effort to save time and money, poor decision making, not poor technology, doomed the Deepwater Horizon.

“We know how to do this,” he says of drilling for oil thousands of feet below the ocean surface, and many thousands of feet further into the earth. “It’s safe as long as everything is done properly, and most of these materials have been around for decades. This isn’t something new and wild out there that we can’t handle. Corners were cut and it bit them.”

Steffes, a PCC (Portland Cement Concrete) research engineer at Iowa State University’s Institute for Transportation, bases his conclusions on 17 years of overseas oil rig experience, including a blowout on an offshore well in the Middle East.