Nick Snow
Washington Editor
Disregard the Obama administration's elimination of oil and gas research and development from its proposed fiscal 2012 budget for the US Department of Energy. Christopher A. Smith, deputy assistant US energy secretary for oil and gas in DOE's fossil energy office, still has plenty of work to do.
After joining DOE in October 2009 following 11 years with Chevron Corp. and Texaco Inc. working primarily on upstream business development and LNG trading, Smith said his first few months on the job were spent largely on examining questions about gas shale resource development.
That all changed on Apr. 20, 2010, when someone came into a meeting he was attending and handed him a note to call a BP PLC executive because one of the company's deepwater oil wells had caught fire and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, he continued.
"Eleven workers lost their lives that night," Smith told the American Gas Association's Natural Gas Roundtable on Feb. 22. "They worked in an industry with a previously exemplary safety record, but they would not be going home to their homes and families. It was imperative for the government to learn why."
US President Barack Obama formed an independent commission soon after to investigate the accident's causes and its implications for US offshore oil and gas policies. Smith, whose office already was involved in technical R&D, participated as one commission subcommittee considered whether or how sophisticated technology had failed.
"Some subcommittee members forgot to use their inside voices," he recalled, referring to instructions parents and teachers give small children. "They were passionate because they cared."
'Collective risk'
What eventually emerged, he said, was a sense that while various phases of the offshore exploration and production process employed fully tested processes and technologies, little consideration had been given to what could go wrong once everything was put together.
"The industry needs to address this collective risk question so it can continue to operate offshore," Smith said. "There are a lot of smart people working in it. They need to identify specific problems and offer solutions. The government is ready to listen to them."
That also applies to shale gas, he said. "In many cases, activity is returning to parts of the country where it hasn't been for a generation," said Smith. "It's an economic opportunity for communities, but it also poses challenges which need to be discussed and addressed."
In the meantime, he said, a research program created under the 2005 Energy Policy Act which uses some federal oil and gas revenue is turning its attention to questions raised in the Macondo well accident and subsequent crude oil spill.
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