The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Assistant Professor Dimitrios Kalliontzis has received a $500,000 share of $20 million awarded by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) to the Gulf Offshore Research Institute (GORI)’s Repurposing Petroleum Infrastructure for Sustainable Energy, Food, and Critical Minerals project.
Funding was awarded to two teams out of ten finalist and 164 original applicant teams through the Gulf Futures Challenge — a $50 million initiative.
“The main goal of this project is to find a solution to an ongoing problem in the Gulf Coast region related to existing offshore platforms and other Gulf assets at or nearing their end of operational life: many of these platforms once used by the oil and gas industry are now at a point where they need to be repurposed or decommissioned, and decommissioning is a very costly procedure – most platform owners would prefer to avoid it,” Kalliontzis said.
“These assets in the offshore region can be repurposed instead of decommissioned, and they can be retrofitted, repaired and continue their operational life in the Gulf of America under new transformative applications,” he added. “This has far-reaching economic implications, both because it creates new jobs and because it catalyzes a new energy transition-based economic environment with new opportunities for the communities involved.”
Kalliontzis’s role will be to develop a multi-tiered workforce initiative spanning from K-12 students to practicing professional engineers, in collaboration with Dr. Pernell, Executive Director of UH Energy's Educational Programs. Grounded in Kalliontzis’s frontline research on fluid-structure interaction, wave energy conversion and the repurposing of aging offshore oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf of America, the program will support the region’s energy transition at the critical intersection of legacy energy expertise and emerging marine energy technologies.
“The R&D will focus on multiple components. One would be the assessment: developing a rigorous risk and condition assessment framework for existing platforms — to qualify or disqualify them for incorporating marine energy devices. We will also need to advance our understanding of retrofitting strategies so that we can safely and efficiently install these marine energy systems. As we learn, we will also teach the student and professional participants — through an integrated research-education, bidirectional design,” he said.
“We also plan to develop a course that is currently missing from the Cullen College of Engineering and the UH Energy program on marine energy and offshore asset repurposing — one dedicated to these emerging topics,” added Kalliontzis. “This program will have a multi-scale impact: within the university, within curriculum development, for students taking this topic on for their PhD and performing R&D tasks toward workforce development for the Gulf of America’s energy transition. Marine energy has long been a missing part of the picture of the energy mission of the University of Houston, and through this program, we are working to bring it fully under the energy transition umbrella.”
“We expect that this is going to have an impact at both the university level and across the Gulf region. We will be generating new data, new risk frameworks and new design tools that can be leveraged by the oil and gas industry — while simultaneously preparing the next generation of students and those who are already in the industry so that they can be ready for the energy transition in the Gulf of America.”