Depth Of Knowledge: Educating A New
Generation Of Subsea Engineers
19 September 2013
Julian Turner
An acute shortage of 10,000 ultra-deep water specialists has prompted the University of Houston to establish the first ever
US graduate program in subsea engineering. Founding Director Matthew Franchek talks about core skill sets, student
demographics and the goal of establishing worldwide standards for subsea engineering education.
The Pressure Is On The Global Offshore Industry
The pressure is on the global offshore industry, literally and figuratively, as it enters ultra-deep water environments in
search of the planet's remaining oil and natural gas reserves. As recently as five years ago, recovering hydrocarbons
efficiently and safely at depths in excess of 10,000ft and at pressures up to 5,000psi was widely seen as logistically and
economically unviable.
For students enrolled this semester on the University of Houston's (UH) Masters Degree course in subsea engineering,
the first of its kind in the US, extreme environments such as these - the final frontier of oil and natural gas exploration - will
be the norm for the majority of their careers.
"Ultra-deep technology today is a magnitude different compared with five years ago - we simply could not do what we are
doing now without that growth," states founding director Matthew Franchek. "Demand for oil in the US and abroad is
growing and ultra-deep water operations are now economically feasible, driving the demand for subsea engineers.
"Following strategic discussions with oil and gas companies as part of a local outreach program, we learned there was a
huge skills vacuum in the ultra-deep water environment - the industry needed 10,000 engineers. There was a lack of
consensus about what a subsea engineer was in terms of
formal training, so we put the curriculum in place at UH's
Cullen College of Engineering. The first flow assurance
course began in January 2011: now there is a ten-course
curriculum with 200 students.
Core Skill Sets: The Importance Of Flow Assurance
Central to both Cullen College's subsea engineering
certificate program and its Masters Degree is the study of
flow assurance, a term coined by the Brazilian multinational Petrobras to describe the successful flow of the hydrocarbon
stream from the reservoir to the point of sale. Otherwise known as multiphase transport, this relatively new field of
expertise encompasses multiple engineering disciplines and is a critical facet of upstream operations in low-temperature,
high-pressure environments where disruptions to production can be exorbitantly expensive.
"The number one skill set that the subsea engineer needs is flow assurance," Franchek says.. "It doesn't matter where
you are in the world - 10,000ft deep in the Gulf of Mexico or at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean - when you're on the sea
floor, it's the same temperature; just 4°C. The pressures are very different at that depth and the modern subsea engineer
has to understand the multitude of factors that influence the flow over the lifetime of the subsea production system.”
Flow assurance also involves monitoring and understanding the behaviour of solid deposits such as gas hydrates,
asphaltenes and naphthenates inside oil and gas pipelines, the conditions under which they form and how they interact
with one another to cause blockages that threaten asset integrity.
"Oil, gas, water and sand are all coming through the pipeline," explains Franchek. "A build-up of hydrates can result in an
instantaneous ice plug and in 10,000ft of water at just 4°C, that's not going to thaw out. The other course areas that
complement flow assurance cover materials and corrosion, pipeline and riser design, subsea processing, artificial lift you're at 10,000ft, you got to get the raw product to the surface - and then control and systems integration."
Practical Magic: Reverse Education, Networking And Student Demographics
Combining academic traditions with practical engineering best-practices from leading offshore professionals, Cullen
College's postgraduate course is funded by the students, 70% of whom are already working full-time in the oil and gas
industry.
"One of the biggest attributes of the subsea program - other than learning from the people who invented this discipline and
networking with your contemporaries - is that it is a current-events type of curriculum," says Franchek. "We spend about
20% of the course on classical engineering theory, while 50% is spent translating that into engineering best practices and
30% on a practical case study. This case study takes the form of a real-world project that we already know the answers
to, and is judged by external industry experts. It is reverse education, in a way: here's the project, this is the knowledge
base that drives it, now how do we solve it?"
The postgraduate course also aims to educate a new generation of subsea engineering professionals adept at working
under increased scrutiny from lawmakers. "Whatever the American Petroleum Institute (API) regulation are, we're pulling
that information into the course and showing students how to design subsea systems within these guidelines," notes
Franchek. "It's a relevant education."
The Global Classroom: Establishing A Worldwide Core Curriculum
In addition to pioneering the first academic program in subsea engineering in the
US, Cullen College is part of the Global Subsea University Alliance. Six of the
world's top subsea engineering universities are collaborating on establishing
worldwide standards and a core curriculum for subsea engineering education.
"When you're hiring a mechanical engineer, you know what you're hiring, but when
you hire a subsea engineer, everybody has their own version or variation," explains
Franchek. "What we started to do this last May after the Offshore Technology
Conference (OTC) is to define what a subsea engineer looks like. U of H will
confirm its program with other institutions such as the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro in Brazil and the National University of Singapore. The Global Subsea
Alliance is about curriculum sharing. All of our customers are international and may
be transferred, so if a student took a course at Aberdeen University, then the
University of Houston would automatically accept that course content," he adds.
Following a forensic examination of the world's top subsea engineering courses, alliance members will establish a core
global curriculum, and form committees to establish standards for specialties such as flow assurance, subsea processing
and system design and control. "The core curriculum will fall under the umbrella of analysis-led design," says Franchek.
"We will use existing knowledge base, but also focus on prototyping and modelling in order to predict what happens
subsea, and perform simulations, performance prediction and reliability calculations."
Why it has taken the US in general, and Cullen College in particular, until now to offer a subsea engineering program on a
par with other universities?
"We weren't 100% sure that it was possible to go into ultra-deep water, but now it is economically feasible and the
technology is in place," he says. "Fracking has challenged some of the profitability of ultra-deep water oil and gas, but with
fracking you get more natural gas than oil, so the demand for oil in the US and abroad is still growing."
This skills shortage has inevitably led to increased demand for a new generation of subsea professionals well versed in
the challenges of ultra-deep water environments - a gap in the employment market that Cullen College is uniquely
positioned to fill. The course is going live online this semester to reach offshore and onshore personnel," says Franchek.
"In a way we are maintaining the culture of the oil and gas industry."
http://www.offshore-technology.com/features/feature-subsea-engineering-graduate-programme-university-houston/