URI professor deep into Gulf oil-spill cleanup efforts

URI PROFESSOR Malcolm L. Spaulding, left, and Applied Science Associates CEO Eoin Howlett show an illustration of modeling tool CoastMap. /
URI PROFESSOR Malcolm L. Spaulding, left, and Applied Science Associates CEO Eoin Howlett show an illustration of modeling tool CoastMap. /

Up close, the Gulf oil spill is horrific, but difficult to grasp. What does it mean to have millions of gallons of crude oil spreading through the water?
Malcolm L. Spaulding, a professor of ocean engineering at the University of Rhode Island, has been modeling oil spills, their impacts and containment since the 1970s. The company he co-founded in 1979, Applied Science Associates, is an international leader in this field.

PBN: You’ve been modeling oil spills for a long time. How did that start?
SPAULDING: We got a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in the early 1970s to look at the efficacy of using dispersants to treat spills. I worked on two big pieces of that project: to develop an oil spill model, and to develop a tool to assess the impact of oil spills on commercial fisheries. … Those technologies have been commercialized [through Applied Science Associates] and are very widely used now.

PBN: Some of those tools are being used to model the Gulf oil spill?
SPAULDING: The model is being used to assist in figuring out where to go to do sampling.
Our spill models have been used in every major oil spill for the last 25 years, so this represents another case example. … [But] the way the system is structured now is that the company is under directions from the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] to not comment to the press beyond saying that they’re working on this.

PBN: How much have these tools improved over time?
SPAULDING: The evolution of them actually followed quite closely the evolution of computing systems. … What we’ve seen is a dramatic increase in computing capacity and access to data via the Internet. So we’re bringing in enormous amounts of information, and the models have gotten much, much more complex as a result. PBN: So you’ve gotten very good at figuring out where things are going. But have you also looked at containment?
SPAULDING: On the modeling side, we at URI have worked on the problem of containment by oil booms and tried to understand the basic physics behind that. It’s a very complicated problem … and we’ve done some experiments in the Ohmsett tank [in New Jersey, run by the U.S. Minerals Management Service], which is the only place in the U.S. with a tank where you can spill oil. … The results are embedded in our next-generation models.

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PBN: Your research goes far beyond oil spill models, though. What else are you doing?
SPAULDING: I’m the senior adviser to the Ocean SAMP project [a $9.8 million project, including federal funds] that URI is doing on behalf of the R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council. I have responsibility for about $1 million and am working on wind-resource assessment, wave environment. I’ve done a lot of work in marine spacial planning to help locate where wind farm development would be optimal.

PBN: Opponents of Cape Wind argued that offshore turbines are not as cost-effective as inland ones. Why do it, then?
SPAULDING: We know that as you go farther offshore, the wind speed at a given elevation increases, so if you take it at the hub height of 80 meters, if you went from Point Judith to Block Island, the wind power increases by a factor of 2.5. If you keep going south of Block Island, it continues to increase, but not by much [more]. … So if you’re thinking about siting a wind turbine at a given elevation, there’s always more power offshore. That said, it’s always more expensive, because of the foundation you need to hold up the tower and the turbine. PBN: Aren’t there better alternatives?
SPAULDING: In Rhode Island, there are no other viable energy sources to meet our renewable energy goals. To give us 15 percent of the state’s energy needs would take about 150 megawatts, and because of the intermittency of the wind, you have to install a 450 megawatt capacity to get a 150 yield. And on land, you’ve got so many other uses [for sites] that you don’t have the big open fields that they have in the Midwest and West.

PBN: A lot of your work is directly tied to industry applications, and just recently you gave a presentation on ocean energy research and economic development in Rhode Island. How much potential do you see there?
SPAULDING: URI does a lot of research, and it doesn’t result in a lot of economic development. … The university has not done a wonderful job of facilitating the transfer of technology to the commercial sector. … There’s a question of the faculty’s interests and focus, and the reward system – if you’re coming up for a promotion and tenure decision, the metric is number of publications and research dollars generated.
Now we’ve had a change of leadership, and the new president [David M. Dooley] has taken this to heart. He just got appointed to the board of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, so there’s a real positive sign for people who are interested in transferring URI technology to the outside. •

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