The CDT: The Currently Demanding Timesink.

*Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions held by others involved, directly or indirectly, with the CDT*

I’ll start with a definition of term(s): CDT actually stands for Centre for Doctoral Training. The purpose of this CDT, to completely plagiarise the website, is:

“The Centre aims to create a highly skilled workforce with expertise that can be used across the wider energy and environmental sectors.  It will equip industry with the skills needed to explore, sustain and reduce the environmental impact of oil and gas exploration and extraction at a time of economic challenge and pressure for responsible environmental management.” See the website for more information.

The CDT programme is sponsored by a selection of oil companies in the hopes that I, and some or all of my peers, will eventually complete our Ph.Ds and make the transition into the oil industry. The actual funding for the Ph.D itself comes from both the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), an non-governmental body, and each host university with a 50/50 split in the funding. The nine companies sponsoring the programme hold the hope that our fresh minds will bring new ideas to generally reduce costs brought to the industry by natural hazards, drilling in the wrong area and so forth. There is also an environmental focus serving to enhance the mitigation of oil spills as well as test the impact of spills and leaks on ocean life.

I am of course grateful for this opportunity and appreciate the collaboration going on between both academic institutions and the companies involved in funding these projects. I am also grateful for the training opportunities which are presented as a direct result of being a part of this CDT, including raising the awareness of environmental issues surrounding the oil and gas industry and the efforts the industry makes to satisfy the needs of the environments in which they explore. The courses also seek to provide us with some knowledge of how the industry explores for hydrocarbons, such as the exploration process and the extraction process. I believe it to be similar to the training offered to all entry level industry employees. We are also presented with the opportunity to make contacts within industry, which may prove vital in the future in securing employment if we do indeed choose to go into industry. It also means we are not only able to make a more informed career decision, but also have better prospects upon completion of our Ph.Ds as we will have training that other applicants may not. Awareness of how the industry operates and skills vital to the industry. The benefits are lining up here. Now for some facts.

The CDT has advertised 75 projects and will be funding 31 of those at a cost of £589,000 a year, resulting in a cumulative spend of £2,356,000 over 4 years on refining existing techniques, developing new techniques for hydrocarbon exploration, as well as protecting infrastructure and the environment. Again, to plagiarise the CDT website:

“In total, just under £8 Million has been pledged to support the scheme, £2.7 Million of which will come from NERC and a further £5.2 Million from the various (academic and affiliated) partners over the next six years.”

Plenty of cash to keep this research going from an environmental council, it’s partners and affiliates, and our host universities, with the training programmes funded by the industry purely to give us an insight into what they do in the real world. The contextualization is very nice to have.

So how are these projects split?

Well there are four themes outlined by the CDT:

• Effective production of Unconventional Hydrocarbons
• Extending the Life of Mature Basins
• Exploitation in Challenging Environments
• Environmental Impact and Regulation

Each theme is said to hold the environment at it’s heart as the environment is a concern for those contributing money to the programme, NERC and the academic world. From this perspective, this set of topic themes is great. It is clear that we still need the industry (see below), so knowing how to go about business with the environment in mind, is brilliant. The industry gets to continue producing oil and gas, and we get to find out how to do this safely.

I went through the list of projects myself and produced my own division of topics from an industrial point of view:

A very black-and-white split of the Ph.D title themes on offer through the CDT. Who doesn’t love a pie chart?

Infrastructure concerns things like pipeline protection from geohazards, environment concerns things like the impact of spills on ecology and the bacterial degradation of oil, and exploration covers everything from fracking (ooh, naughty word) to seismic interpretation to investigations into unconformities. At a glance this is skewed heavily towards the exploration side of the oil and gas industry (partly because exploration involves such a broad range of topics!), but you have to bear in mind the ultimate goal of the industry: to lose as little money as possible, be it through damage to infrastructure or through fines for environmental negligence, but to ultimately extract as much product as possible and to make a profit. Not only does a major spill produce a lot of bad press for a company, but it is also a LOT of lost product that they will not get back. They also wouldn’t want to annoy the locals with fracking, so doing it more effectively would be great for everyone. Reminds me of George Carlin talking about ‘NIMBY’ (Not In My Back Yard).

Taken from the Wood Review 2011 (originally from the BBC).

You can see from the Wood Review (completely free of bias right?) that the profit margin of the oil industry stood at around 7-10% in 2013 when the oil price was high, with the industry barely scraping by in 1997 when there were no distinguishable profits (from this figure anyway!). So you could say that during times of rising oil prices, the industry makes more, and during ‘leaner’ times when oil price is falling, the industry makes less profit. Simples. Anyway. The industry tends to prepare itself for these leaner times when prices are falling to buffer itself from a fall in profits or a rise in costs, like some kind of insurance. Pretty smart. I guess, from a business perspective it isn’t surprising that the industry would be more concerned with gaining as much product as possible in the hopes that they can make as much profit as possible. Sweeping statement alert: As the oil and gas industry underpins much of the world’s economy, why not let them take some profit for the work they do? After all, products of the industry exist in every aspect of modern life from artifical vanilla flavouring (this isn’t nuts, it’s vanilla) to clothing and all the plastics we use.Without the oil industry our lives would most definitely be altered beyond recognition. So while there is a real emphasis on FINDING more oil (high demand, increasingly difficult to find readily available oil), there is also an effort to improve the existing infrastructure and look after the environment and ultimately reduce accidents. Believe it or not, oil spills aren’t in the best interests of the industry. It’s a lot of money, quite literally, down the drain.

Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, Gulf of Mexico. Imagine just how much product was lost. Never mind the cleanup cost and bad press that BP received. It makes sense for industry companies to avoid this right? Even if no one were to be caught up in the blaze.

This brings me to my next point. I am apparently a rare breed, my Ph.D title falling into the relatively small infrastructure section of the pie chart. As a result, the training offered by the CDT may not necessarily cover the topic of my Ph.D. More benefit for me? I get to listen and learn about the rest of the oil and gas industry which I seldom encounter from my world of turbidity currents. I feel this may be a drawback for others as they may not learn enough about the vital aspect of the industry which is turbidity currents, while vital, is not as highly prized as the ability to find more of this liquid gold, and rightly so. Because of this ‘training gap’, the directors of the CDT have instructed us to produce presentations to keep each other up to date on our research, inadvertently broadening our training even more. Fantastic! Here’s hoping that ‘cup of tea’ analogies will win some people over and make them aware of the geohazards out there that can potentially create problems for the industry.

The only drawbacks to the CDT that I can possibly think of are that the training takes such a long time. 6 weeks in 6 months so far. A week per month. Roughly a quarter of our Ph.D lives so far have been spent on training. Another drawback being that, while the topics covered so far have been interesting, have not been entirely relevant to each Ph.D. The length of training sessions is not set to continue however, as we progress through our Ph.Ds, the length of the training decreases. That does leave me wondering to what extent each aspect of the industry will be covered. I suppose time will tell.

Some takeaway messages from this post would be that more environmental impact and infrastructure Ph.D topics could be brought forward, but this may stifle the efforts of those concerned with exploration. It’s also important to remember that, while spills happen, oil companies seek to prevent these as much as possible, and that without the oil industry, life wouldn’t be as we know it.