Chemical Engineering Professional Skills 2011

The following activity is designed to prompt expression of your knowledge of, and ability to apply, engineering professional skills. Its purpose is to determine how well your engineering program has taught you these skills. By participating, you are giving your consent to have your posts used for academic research purposes. When your posts are evaluated by the program assessment committee, your names will be removed. 

To post a comment: 1) click on the Sign In button in the upper right hand corner of the blog page, then sign in using your gmail account and password (If you don’t have a gmail account, sign up for one – it only takes a couple minutes); 2) scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the word “comments,” which appears right below the list of sources.

Tuesday Week 1 Initial Posts: All participants post initial responses to these instructions (see below) and the scenario.

Time line: You will have 2 weeks to complete the on-line discussion as a team. Use this blog to capture your thoughts, perspectives, ideas, and revisions as you work together on this problem. This activity is discussion-based, meaning you will participate through a collaborative exchange and critique of each other’s ideas and work. The goal is to challenge and support one another as a team to tap your collective resources and experiences to dig more deeply into the issue(s) raised in the scenario. Ideally everyone in the discussion will refine his/her ideas through the discussion that develops, so you should respond well before the activity ends so that the discussion has time to mature. It is important to make your initial posts and subsequent responses in a timely manner. You are expected to make multiple posts during each stage of this on-going discussion. The timeline below suggests how to pace your discussion. This is just a suggestion. Feel free to pace the discussion as you see fit.

Thursday Week 1 Response Posts: Participants respond by tying together information and perspectives on important points and possible approaches. Participants identify gaps in information and seek to fill those gaps.

Tuesday Week 2 Refine Posts: Participants work toward agreement on what is most important, determine what they still need to find out, and evaluate one or more approaches from the previous week’s discussion.

Thursday Week 2 Polish Final Posts: Participants come to an agreement on what is most important, and propose one or more approaches to address the problem(s).

Discussion Instructions

Imagine that you are a team of engineers working together for a company or organization to address the problem(s) raised in the scenario.  Discuss what your team would need to take into consideration to begin to address the problem(s).  You do not need to suggest specific technical solutions, but identify the most important factors and suggest one or more viable approaches.

Suggestions for discussion topics

·         Identify the primary and secondary problems raised in the scenario.

·         Who are the major stakeholders and what are their perspectives?

·         What outside resources (people, literature/references, and technologies) could be engaged in developing viable approaches?

·         Identify related contemporary issues.

·         Brainstorm a number of feasible approaches to address the issue.

·         Consider the following contexts: economic, environmental, cultural/societal, and global. What impacts would the approaches you brainstormed have on these contexts?

·         Come to agreement on one or more viable approaches and state the rationale.

BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Clean Up Controversies

April 2011 marks the one year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest unintended discharge of oil into marine waters in history. The 86-day gusher sent nearly 200 million gallons of oil, tens of millions of gallons of natural gas and 1.8 million gallons of poorly studied chemical dispersants into the northern Gulf of Mexico. The breadth and depth of the oil’s impacts on the Gulf of Mexico’s complex ecosystem continues to be intensely debated.

According to the government’s “oil budget,” released by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in November, a quarter of the oil evaporated or dissolved into the water. Another 13 percent was blown into fine droplets as it rushed from the broken riser pipe, the report says. Much of this dispersed oil mixed with natural gas from the well and remained deep in the gulf as a thin plume that drifted for months.

The chemical dispersant Corexit 9500 sprayed at the wellhead dispersed another 16 percent into fine droplets, which joined the plume, the report says. Natural oil-munching bacteria then swarmed the plumes, according to research published in the journal Science in August by Terry Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Three weeks after the well was capped in July, Hazen and his crew no longer found signs of deep oil or gas as they crisscrossed the gulf.

In addition to the quarter of the oil that NOAA says nature erased, the Unified Command, led by the U.S. Coast Guard, dispensed with a third of it. Some 17 percent of the total got sucked into the “top hat” lowered onto the broken riser pipe or was otherwise directly recovered, loaded onto tankers and moved to refineries. Flaring at the surface burned another 5 percent. Only 3 percent of the oil was skimmed.
Much of the criticism focused on the dispersant’s effectiveness, along with whether it damaged, or will damage, wildlife.

 “The dispersants got stuck in deep water layers around 3,000 feet [915 meters] and below,” said study leader David Valentine, a microbial geochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara…. “We were seeing it three months after the well had been capped. We found that all of that dispersant added at depth stayed in the deepwater plumes. Not only did it stay, but it didn’t get rapidly biodegraded as many people had predicted.”

In total, the response team pumped over 800,000 gallons of dispersants into the oil flow; dispersants break down oil into smaller droplets that can degrade more quickly. But the impact of the dispersants themselves has been up for debate. For the new study, scientists tracked the dispersants by following one of its ingredients: dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate (DOSS).

Some 640,000 pounds (290,000 kilograms) of DOSS was injected between April and July, a huge number made all the more daunting because the chemical comprises only ten percent of the total dispersant volume, according to the study, published online January 26 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The dispersants had degraded very little by September, and were still found at ocean depths of around 3,000 feet below. But researchers aren’t sure what to make of this realization that the dispersants lingered longer than expected:

On the one hand, it is positive that the dispersants remained in deep waters and didn’t float up through the water column, where they would have mingled with surface layers, says Elizabeth Kujawinski, a chemical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who led the study. “But the bad news is that it stayed there. It didn’t really go away as quickly as maybe they had thought it would.”

As for the impact on deep sea marine animals, already battered by the spill, researchers just don’t know what the future holds. Says environmental toxicologist Ronald Kendal:
“These organisms have developed capabilities to live under high pressures, with low oxygen levels, and with no sunlight. It’s a more rigorous and perhaps less changing environment, and all of a sudden a wave of chemical dispersants comes by. What does that mean for the environment? I don’t know. I really don’t. But it concerns me significantly.”

Sources

A year after BP oil spill, fate of gulf ecosystem remains murky. (April 17, 2011). The Washington Post.

Deepwater Horizon Dispersants Lingered in the Deep. (January 27, 2011). Nature.

Gulf Spill Dispersants Surprisingly Long Lasting. (January 27, 2011). National Geographic.

Chemical Dispersants Used in the BP Oil Spill Lingered in the Ocean Depths (January 31, 2011). Discover.