Univ. of Houston students work with industry on powerful new blowout preventer

Read says his design can deliver five million pounds of shear force, more than twice as much as the most powerful rams shears available today

BOP Technologies

University of Houston engineering students are expected to complete a CAPSTONE project in their senior year. For one group of seniors, that means working on cutting-edge designs for the next generation of offshore oil production blowout preventers.

Earlier this year the students asked BOP Technologies, a Houston startup company that is creating the new BOP, if they could be a part of its project. Company leaders readily agreed.

Their efforts are coming at just the right time. Experts concluded after the 2010 BP Macondo oil spill that the BOP shear rams were not powerful enough to cut and control the drill pipe after it buckled.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which regulates offshore drilling, is currently finalizing regulations that may require drillers to “install technology that is capable of severing any components of the drill string” within 10 years and to install two shear rams on BOP stacks.

University of Houston students working with BOP Technologies staff.

Traditional BOP ram shears have not had the force to shear thicker, larger diameter pipe components like collars and tool joints. BOPs capable of working under the high pressure of deepwater drilling are also so large and heavy that stability on the wellhead can be a problem.

BOP Technologies founder, Jay Read, invented the CIRBOP (Circular Intensifier RAM Blowout Preventer) and the company is now working on the design details and moving to a test prototype. The students’ research will go into the design work for the CIRBOP.

Read says his design can deliver five million pounds of shear force, more than twice as much as the most powerful rams shears available today, and is compact enough to allow drillers to reduce the weight of BOP stacks by 30 per cent.

So the University of Houston students, who are in the Mechanical Engineering Technology Department and supervised by assistant professor Medhat El-Nahas, aren’t just learning valuable engineering skills.

They may be preventing the next offshore oil spill.