Award Amount: $992, 416
Project Director: Christoph Aeppli (Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences)
Key Personnel:    Fernando Galvez (Louisiana State University); Collin Ward and Chris Reddy (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution); French McCay (Applied Science Associates, Inc., RPS Group), and Andrew Whitehead (University of California Davis)

Overview: Oil “photo-products” are formed at the water surface in large quantities in the early phase of an oil spill by the interaction of floating oil with sunlight.  This project will advance scientific understanding of oil photo-product risks by producing comprehensive data on their environmental production rates, bioavailability, and dose-dependent toxicity and activation of biological pathways. To translate this knowledge for the purpose of improved oil spill risk and damage assessment, the data will be integrated into algorithms that can be implemented into oil spill models. This will enable researchers and practitioners to measure and predict concentrations and effects of oil photo-products in future oil spills. Furthermore, an inter-laboratory calibration exercise will be conducted in order to standardize photo-product measurement.

Award Amount: $124,342
Project Director: Wei Wu (University of Southern Mississippi)
Project Team Affiliations: University of Southern Mississippi
Overview: This project proposes to develop a tool which integrates knowledge from both natural and social sciences and quantifies uncertainties to help resource managers in the Gulf of Mexico understand how ecosystems—and the benefits they provide to people—may change as a result of different management decisions (such as developing offshore oil and gas or restoring coastal wetlands). This tool could allow decision makers to evaluate the potential risks and trade-offs that these types of decisions entail in a dynamic system like the Gulf of Mexico. This tool may also be used by policymakers in other regions who want to maximize the benefits that ecosystems provide to people.

Award Amount: $176,546
Project Director: Minor Sinclair (Oxfam America)
Project Team Affiliations: Oxfam America in cooperation with Limitless Vistas, Inc.
Overview: To improve economic opportunities, promote resilience, and fill workforce gaps, the project team will work to train underserved minorities and women in low-income Gulf Coast communities for high-demand, higher-wage work with local employers in energy, environmental health, disaster response, and ecosystem restoration. Team members plan to develop relationships with these employers to cultivate opportunities for program participants. By growing this program designed to build employment equity in the workforce, the project intends to help communities be more resilient in the face of future disasters.
Final Report: View PDF
 

Award Amount: $125,000
Project Director: Maureen Lichtveld (Tulane University)
Key Personnel: Jeffrey Wickliffe (Tulane University) 
Project Team Affiliations: Tulane University in cooperation with Fletcher Technical Community College and South Central Louisiana Technical College
Overview: The project team will work to build a safer workforce in southeastern Louisiana by identifying key environmental health and disaster management knowledge and skills and teaching them to community college students and current workers in oil production, marine operations, and nursing. Project partners plan to develop educational products that other organizations can adapt and use. The project team will work to ensure that key practical skills and training products are relevant to workplace settings by drawing on the expertise of its members, which include educational institutions, industry groups, and employers.
Final Report: View PDF
 

Award Amount: $124,931
Project Director: Joan Hendrix (Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College)
Key Personnel: Stephanie Roberts (Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College)
Project Team Affiliation: Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College
Overview: The project team will work to train oil and gas workers and health professionals to better understand, communicate, and work with each other in simulated emergency environments, enhancing their ability to respond to medical and environmental emergencies in the Gulf of Mexico. By addressing existing gaps in interdisciplinary training for these two groups, the project team intends to build a cohort of Gulf-based responders who are prepared to collaborate with one another during future disaster response scenarios. This training program may also be useful in other U.S. coastal areas where oil and gas production occurs.
Final Report: View PDF

Award Amount: $383,271
Project Director: Saeed Salehi (University of Oklahoma)
Student: Raj Kiran (University of Oklahoma) 
Project Team Affiliation: University of Oklahoma
Overview: The project team plans to develop training modules to evaluate and strengthen workers’ decision-making skills by developing tools and modules that simulate loss of well control scenarios in the offshore oil and gas environment. These modules could enhance process safety in offshore oil and gas operations by helping operators, training organizations, and regulators assess and manage preventable risks related to human factors.
 

Award Amount: $407,113
Project Director: Antonie Jetter (Portland State University)
Project Team Affiliations: Portland State University in cooperation with Michigan State University, Northeastern University, and Vanderbilt University
Overview: Researchers plan to develop and test a scenario-planning toolkit that oil and gas industry stakeholders can use to explore the factors that strengthen or detract from their organization’s safety culture. They will consider how these factors can be modeled collaboratively, whether modeling can address uncertainty about these factors and their causal relationships, if this exercise helps participants understand what bolsters and hinders safety culture, and whether their participation results in actionable outcomes. Researchers hope this project will produce a modeling approach that organizations can use to develop context-specific safety culture training that is tailored to their unique needs.
 

Award Amount: $788,301
Project Director: James Driskell (Florida Maxima Corporation)
Key Personnel: Tripp Driskell (Florida Maxima Corporation) 
Project Team Affiliations: Florida Maxima Corporation in cooperation with Institute for Energy Technology and University of Central Florida
Overview: Workers in the offshore oil and gas industry operate in high-stress situations where faulty communication or decision-making can have severe consequences. This project aims to develop a tool that passively monitors and assesses verbal output in real-time communications to provide information on the cognitive states of speakers. This information could help with detecting issues that could affect decision-making processes and inform intervention and mitigation efforts to address those issues.
 

Award Amount: $591,060
Project Director: Zhiqu Lu (University of Mississippi)
Key Personnel: Lei Cao (University of Mississippi) 
Project Team Affiliation: University of Mississippi
Overview: As offshore deepwater oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico continues to grow and expand, the risk of underwater oil spills resulting from both natural events and human accidents also increases. Real-time monitoring could help provide early detection of spills that is critical for minimizing impact. Existing monitoring techniques have significant limitations and cannot achieve real-time monitoring. This project launches an effort to develop a functional real-time monitoring system that uses acoustic technologies to detect, locate, and characterize undersea hydrocarbon leakages over large areas in a cost-effective manner.
 

Award Amount: $2,614,143
Project Director: Mileva Radonjic (Louisiana State University)
Project Team Affiliations: Louisiana State University in cooperation with SINTEF, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Texas at Austin
Overview: Leaky wellbores with inadequate well plugging materials can allow for the release of hydrocarbons into the ocean at low rates for decades, resulting in cumulative damage to surrounding areas. The goal of this project is to advance capabilities for the prevention and remediation of wellbore leakage in offshore hydrocarbon-producing wells. The project will develop and test new materials to improve or replace current materials used in the plugging and abandonment of wells and develop new methods for placing such materials.

Award Amount: $1,185,963
Project Director: Ramanan Krishnamoorti (University of Houston)
Key Personnel: Andrea Prosperetti (University of Houston)
Key Personnel: Konstantinos Kostarelos (University of Houston) 
Project Team Affiliations: University of Houston in cooperation with Mulberry Well Systems LLC
Overview: Formation and management of gas within deepwater marine drilling risers poses a variety of challenges and hazards for offshore energy operations. Uncontrolled riser gas build-up and release were major components of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. This project aims to improve understanding of riser gas formation and unloading (i.e., the processes involved in managing riser gas) through the development, calibration, and implementation of modeling to describe the dynamics pertaining to riser gas under different situations and operating conditions and the assessment of instrumentation that could be used to detect riser gas properties and behavior.
 

Award Amount: $4,910,159
Project Director: Wesley Williams (Louisiana State University)
Key Personnel: Renato Coutinho (Louisiana State University) 
Project Team Affiliations: Louisiana State University in cooperation with Texas A&M University and Weatherford
Overview: Pressure barriers provide the primary means of preventing uncontrolled hydrocarbon releases in offshore wells. However, these barriers are only effective if they have been designed, properly operated, and maintained for the conditions of the environment in which they are employed. The 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.

Award Amount: $670,720
Project Director: Geir Hareland (Oklahoma State University)
Key Personnel: Runar Hygaard (Oklahoma State University)
Project Team Affiliation: Oklahoma State University
Overview: Cement is a major material component in the construction and sealing of hydrocarbon wells. Well leakage through cement is a problem that increases maintenance costs and poses threats to surrounding communities and the environment. This project aims to improve characterization and understanding of well cement mixtures to better predict leakage potential and investigate cement additives that could reduce leakage potential and improve wellbore integrity. This information will improve modeling capability of wellbore integrity and guide designs that can be used to reduce leakage.

Award Amount: $312,283
Project Director: Tara Lambeth (University of New Orleans Center for Hazard Assessment, Response and Technology [UNO-CHART])
Student: Jessica Parfait (United Houma Nation) 
Project Team Affiliations: University of New Orleans in cooperation with Louisiana Sea Grant and the United Houma Nation
Overview: The project team plans to collaborate with two United Houma Nation communities to document how environmental stressors affect the livelihoods of these communities and shape the mitigation strategies they use to protect their coastal lands. Team members will record traditional ecological knowledge, local adaption plans, current mitigation efforts, and the tribe’s adaptive capacities. They intend to produce a resource that can be used by the United Houma Nation and other indigenous communities facing similar challenges. This work may encourage other mitigation and adaption planning efforts and increase communication between communities and policymakers.
 

Award Amount: $459,502
Project Director: Tony Grubesic (Arizona State University)
Key Personnel: Jake Nelson (Arizona State University) 
Project Team Affiliations: Arizona State University in cooperation with the University of Utah
Overview: The project team plans to develop an open-source decision support system that helps responders minimize an oil spill’s environmental, economic, and social impacts by optimizing the deployment of response crews and equipment. By incorporating information from relevant stakeholders and community leaders and mathematically modeling different oil spill scenarios, this system is intended to help coastal communities proactively plan effective responses to deep and ultra-deep water oil spills.

Award Amount: $259,414
Project Director: Susan Lovelace (South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium)
Key Personnel: Lee Bundrick (South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium)
Key Personnel: Matthew Nowlin (College of Charleston) 
Project Team Affiliations: South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium in cooperation with the College of Charleston and the University of Oklahoma
Overview: The project team will use an established approach in a new way to educate and engage coastal residents and community leaders. The team’s goal is to empower these stakeholders to prioritize coastal management issues and become more active in local natural resource management decisions. Through surveys, educational activities, and small-group discussions, project team members plan to identify insights about coastal management priorities and decision-making that they can share with local, state, and regional leaders, particularly those in areas with offshore oil and gas activity.
 

Award Amount: $481,442 
Project Director: Mark Kulp (University of New Orleans)
Project Team Affiliations: University of New Orleans in cooperation with Owens Coastal Consultants 
Overview: The project team intends to pair community groups and volunteers with experienced scientists so the community members can learn how to collect shoreline data. This data can be used to inform oil spill planning and response. In addition to developing citizen scientists who can help address a typical gap in oil spill data, the project team intends to produce a program template that other coastal communities could use to develop similar efforts.
 

Award Amount: $1,000,136 
Project Director: Steven Murawski (University of South Florida)
Key Personnel: Claire Paris (University of Miami) 
Project Team Affiliations: University of South Florida in cooperation with the University of Miami and the University of California, Davis
Overview: The project team plans to synthesize data to explore and quantify how oil spills like Deepwater Horizon affect fishing communities. This work includes both understanding how spills impact communities’ economic, ecological, and social systems — and modeling how these systems could be affected by future spills. Using high-resolution, fishery-dependent datasets, the team will identify how individual communities were affected by the Deepwater Horizon spill. Econometric and hydrodynamic modeling studies will be used to predict such impacts from future potential spills. Working with key fisheries stakeholders and local decision makers, the team plans to identify adaptive strategies that communities could use to mitigate future oil spills’ effects. This project has the potential to transform disaster planning and fisheries management responses to such disasters in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.
 

Award Amount: $590,462
Project Director: So-Min Cheong (University of Kansas)
Project Team Affiliations: University of Kansas in cooperation with Stanford University and St. Mary's College of Maryland
Overview: This team of researchers plans to use environmental, social, and economic data to examine how coastal communities’ abilities to self-organize and mobilize helped them respond to and recover from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They will investigate the social-ecological drivers of community-level spill response and the role of nonprofit organizations and nonprofit networks in enhancing community cohesion after the spill. The researchers will generate outputs that scientists, nonprofits, and government stakeholders can use to help communities respond to and recover from oil spills more effectively.

Award Amount: $2,265,985
Project Director: Carlos Martin (Urban Institute)
Key Personnel: Olivia Arena (Urban Institute) 
Project Team Affiliations: Urban Institute in cooperation with Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, Texas A&M University, and University of California – Berkeley
Overview: Although homes provide a first line of defense for individuals against environmental stressors and disasters, little is understood about how housing shapes community resilience. This project plans to examine housing policies and practices that affect household vulnerability to disasters along with the quality and accessibility of related tools and resources that households can use to reduce those vulnerabilities. The project will develop strategies for equitable housing programs, policies, and practices that can strengthen the resilience of communities as a whole. The focus will be on populations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the greater New Orleans area, but the information and tools developed are intended to help build household resilience throughout the Gulf region.