Click here to watch President Obama’s first Oval Office Address

On June 15, 2010, the first African American to serve as our President of the United States gave his first  Oval Office Address to the Nation.  It was about our work to stop the most dangerous environmental threat our country has faced since we declared independence from the British in 1776: the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil leak crisis.

“Make no mistake. We will fight this with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused, and we will do whatever is necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.  Because there has never been a leak of this size, at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology.  That's why I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge”

President Barack H. Obama

I was one of those engineers. 

The first task required to stop the damage being done to New Orleans, Key West, and the 1000 miles of US shoreline between them, was to produce an accurate official measure of the flow rate of crude oil discharging into the Gulf of Mexico.

An accurate official measure of the flow rate was needed to design a capping system to stop the leak. It was also needed to determine the level of response: the number of ships, planes, responders, miles of boom, tons of dispersant, etc. It would later determine the amount of funds, $20.8 billion, that would go to the people of five Gulf coast states to recover and rebuild.

I produced the first accurate official measure of the flow rate.

Click here to see my report, under penalty of perjury, to the Judicial Conduct Review Board of PA, on my first accurate official measure of the flow rate of crude oil discharging into the Gulf of Mexico

In 2010, I was on the lead team responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil leak crisis,the Plume Team of the Flow Rate Technical Group of the National Incident Command .  The photo above was taken at the NOAA Command Center in Seattle on June 13, 2010.

Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen was the National Incident Commander for the Unified Command responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil leak crisis.

Coast Guard Admiral
Thad W. Allen.

At that time, Dr. McNutt was first woman to serve as the Director of the US Geological Survey since it was established in 1879.  Dr. McNutt is now the first woman to serve as the President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS was founded by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to serve as pro bono “Advisers to the Nation.”

I played an important role in stopping the damage being done to 1000 miles of US shoreline of five Gulf states.  Another flow imaging technology I invented and patented, US Patent 8,391,552, was an important tool I used.  Independent experts reviewed the technology of US 8,391,552 and found it to be “something the petrochemical industry had sought for 50 years.”

An award from USGS Director McNutt for my
“Exemplary Service to the Nation”

Then, with Dr. McNutt, I co-authored the definitive peer-reviewed journal paper on how much crude oil was discharged into the Gulf of Mexico by British Petroleum:

Review of the Flow Rate Estimates of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

We published our paper in
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Our paper was the basis for British Petroleum being fined $20.8 billion dollars under the Clean Water Act.  It was the largest single fine of a single entity in US history.  Our paper is one of the most important and most-cited peer-reviewed journal papers in US history.  It has been cited more than 500 times in peer-reviewed journal papers.  It has been downloaded from the PNAS website more than 40,000 times.

Working behind-the-scenes with the Director of the US Geological Survey, Dr. Marcia McNutt, to disqualify the US Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar from giving technical testimony about the amount of crude oil discharged into the Gulf of Mexico by BP’s exploded Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

A personal letter I later received from Marcia thanking me .

COMING SOON:  Why wehad to disqualify the Secretary of the Interior.

Click here to see the Litigation Hold I was under for five years
ordered by the following US Department of Justice attorneys:

• Sarah Himmelhoch, Senior Attorney, Environmental Enforcement Section
• Stephen R. Campbell, Senior Trial Counsel, Aviation and Admiralty Section
• Robert G. Dreher, Principal Deputy, Assistant Attorney General
• Ann Ravel, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Torts

In the email above, I report my first accurate official measure of the flow rate of 80,000 barrels per day at a depth of 5000 feet.   This included methane in a supercritical thermodynamic state.

The fine under the Clean Water Act is levied based on barrels of oil only at the sea surface.   When the expansion of oil from 5000 feet pressure to the sea surface is accounted for, and when the methane is excluded, my measure of the flow rate was 55,000 bpd at standard temperature and pressure at the sea surface.   The calculations are explained in detail in my peer reviewed journal paper with my colleagues at UC Berkeley:

Determining the discharge rate from a submerged oil leak jet
using ROV video    
by Frank Shaffer, Ömer Savaş,   Kenneth Lee, and Giorgio de Vera,
UC Berkeley Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Journal of Flow Measurement and Instrumentation, 43, 34–46, 2015

On June 14, 2010, at 6:30 PM, I was alone with Secretary of Energy Nobel Laureate Dr. Steven Chu in his office at the DOE HQ Forrestal Building.   DOI Secretary Salazar and USGS Director McNutt arrived at 7:00 PM.   We had a conference call with the Directors of the DOE National Laboratories. The Director of Los Alamos, Michael Anastasio, proposed detonating a thermonuclear device 5000 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico to stop the leak.

We then met with the White House Communications Team and the Flow Rate Technical Group to help prepare President Obama’s first Oval Office Address.

In 2013, I was the given the responsibility and $1.5 million in funding to develop the technology to prevent another prolonged deep sea oil leak .  This included large-scale experiments with JP5 Jet Fuel at the OHMSETT facility inside Naval Weapons Station Earle.

DESIGNING A CAPPING SYSTEM TO STOP THE OIL LEAK:
To design a capping system to stop the discharge of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico 5000 feet deep below the exploded Deepwater Horizon oil rig, an accurate official measure of the flow rate of oil discharging by the federal government was needed.   Below is Figure 4 from our National Academy of Sciences paper I co-authored with USGS Director Dr. Marcia McNutt.   The true flow rate ( the blue band around a dotted-line ) was measured when the leak was capped by using the capping system as a venturi meter.   I developed the first accurate official measure of the flow rate ( the green line labeled NETL ), followed by Lemont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).  

OFFICIAL ESTIMATES OF THE OIL FLOW RATE DURING THE CRISIS

Publishing the first official measure of the flow rate carried significant risks, including possible retaliation by British Petroleum.   During a few weeks of the crisis, the estimates produced by the Plume Team were the top subject on every major news outlet in the US and UK.

My measurement of the flow rate, along with official measures by other USDOE National Laboratories led to the design of a well capping system that was 40 feet tall and weighed 100 tons.