One of the key industries in Lafayette and South Louisiana has been the oil industry, and UL has produced some of the best engineers in the field. Dr. Ali Ghalambor talks about the Department of Petroleum Engineering.
How did you end up at UL?
I came to the United States in 1969, and I enrolled at UL in 1970, where I earned my BS in Petroleum Engineering in 1974. After that, I worked in the industry at Tenneco and Amerada Hess, in Lafayette and in Tulsa, Oklahoma for several years. Then I went to Virginia Tech for my PhD. From there I went back to industry with Occidental Petroleum, and I came back to UL in 1982.
What brought you back?
When I was in industry, we had did research for the Department of Energy and the Bureau of Mines. So my name was out there. And I stayed in touch with some of the UL faculty, so they knew what I was doing. They had been asking me to come back for a few years. Finally in 1982 when I was asked by the company to transfer to California office, I saw some different opportunites in academia. So I decided I wanted to try it, and ended up in Lafayette.
How do you like being back?
I was very appreciative of the opportunity to come back. Some of the faculty who had taught me were still here, and it gave me a chance to work with them. I also had a lot of friends at UL who went into management in the oil industry, and I've kept in touch with them as well. I try to use some of their knowledge & experience to work on student training, and research development. So I'm in a position to create a bridge between academia and industry.
Talk about some of your successes here.
I've served off and on in the Department administration. I was appointed acting Department Head in 1987, and after a year I was appointed Department Head until 1992 . In 1993, they asked me to step back in for about a year, again as acting Head; in 2000 I was asked to step in as Department Head again.
In 2000, we were getting ready for accreditation in 2001, and they asked me to help. I did, and we had one of the best reviews in the history of the Department. I thought my job was done, but there was another change, and they asked me to stay on. We just recently had another round of accreditation review in 2007. We did very well again; excellent, actually.
Between 1987 and 1992, it was a hard time for the Department, because of the decreasing enrollment and the decline of the oil industry. Despite that, we managed to do a lot of recruiting, and we managed to keep the Department very competitive in terms of student enrollment and placement, and that got us a lot of recognition from our peer institutions. So we kept the Department afloat during those hard times.
Then of course after I returned to the administration in 2000, we re-instated the Masters program, which had been eliminated in the late 1990s. We petitioned the Board of Regents in 2002, and were successful. We were allowed to start the program in a probation status for 3 years, but after only 2 years they lifted the probation because we were doing so well. That's pretty unusual. Now the Masters program is flourishing, as is our undergraduate program. We have one of the most productive graduate programs in the College of Engineering, with about 40 graduate students. With more resources, we can expand even more.
In addition, from early 2000 to the present we greatly increased the Department's research grants & publications, especially books. Our faculty has published four books in the last six years, and two more are in press. That places us ahead of most of our peer institutions, and even peer-plus, institutions.
We have also been able to attract quite a bit of funding from industry and the government, at an increase of about 10% annually for the last several years. That's not just funding for research, but also for scholarships, graduate student fellowships, and laboratory development. Right now we're working on a grant for about $250,000, and several private organizations and industry are helping us. We've raised about 80% of it.
We've also just finished a 5 year program through the US Department of Education, an exchange program with Brazil. Our students go over there for 5-6 months, with transportation and a stipend supplied by our government. Then Brazilian students come here to study, and their government pays their expenses. So during the past 5 years, our students were exposed to other cultures, and other systems. That's really important in our industry; you may be in Houston today and in South America or Russia tomorrow. So that cultural experience gives our students an edge, it made our students very attractive to prospective employers.
Dr. Boyun Guo, one of prolific faculty members currently has a project with NASA. That's very unusual for our field; NASA usually works with Mechanical or Chemical Engineering programs. But we had some ideas about waste-water treatment in space station, which is critical because of the space and weight limitation. Boyun developed several models, and our graduate students did research and got several publications from that work.
The other area where we are very strong, is that we work very closely with industry in helping them develop conferences and symposia, and they've been very generous about giving back some of the proceeds to UL. We just finished a conference February 11-15, the International Symposium & Exhibition on Formation Damage Control. We had about 575 attendees from 30 different countries, right here in the Lafayette Hilton, and about 100 papers were presented. So Lafayette and UL are recognized for organizing this event every other year. That has attracted attention to Lafayette as the place that is strong in the area of Formation Damage Control.
It also has a very positive economic impact on our community. Not only in terms of the expenditure from the visitors to the community businesses, but even better, it also it provides a venue for the local oilfield companies to introduce their products and services to a global audience. Millions of dollars have probably been generated as a result of the holding the conference in Lafayette; the real economic impact is immeasurable. And of course, our students also participate in these functions, and get introductions to people in the industry, which gives them a hiring advantage over students at peer institutions. They get jobs & internships. So that's another facet of what we do which has a positive impact on UL and the local economy.
We're doing all of this with a tiny faculty pool. There are only 5 of us, we're the smallest Department in Engineering, but we support 200 undergraduates and 40 graduates, so it's all the more impressive.
You head up the Energy Institute here at UL. Talk about that.
The EI had been around for several years. Several months ago I was asked to see if we could rejuvenate it. We are initiating several projects there, working with industry to develop joint projects that are still in their infancy. But we're going to increase the level of continuing education in the EI, to make use of UL's faculty expertise, offering short courses, training, professional development. There's a big demand for that.
Tell us about your own research.
We have a new initiative, Developing New technologies for Production & Exploration of Petroleum, NTPEP. This is a project under EI, using LITE to analyze geologic formations, to enhance drilling. We're looking at using heavy foam as a deep-water drilling fluid. The pressures in deep ocean floors are so high that the formation strength is insufficient for successful drilling. So you try to use a drilling fluid that is both sufficiently viscous, and yet dense enough, to support the formation.
Another project we're looking at is using cyclic CO2 injection to enhance recovery for some of the mature oil fields in LA. Technologies of that kind are important for small operators and independent companies. The Department of Energy awarded us a grant of $750,000 for our research there.
What else is going on in Petroleum Engineering?
Our student chapter is very active. We just took 44 students to the annual meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers in Anaheim CA. The students only had to pay $100; we picked up the rest of the costs from industry and other sources. This is very important for the students’ professional development. We're getting ready to send almost that many students to the annual meeting of American Association of Drilling Engineers in Houston in March. So our students are very productive and proactive interacting with the industry.
Our students don't miss any activities; they are constantly networking and learning from the industry. In fact, they will be putting on an industry appreciation crawfish boil the 26th of Apri. Our students like that, and they benefit from it.
Most of our students are on scholarship, and they're getting better all the time. I should also comment that we have had 100% placement of our graduates, they all get jobs in the industry, or go into graduate programs. Many of our Masters students are highly sought by the best PhD programs, Texas, Oklahoma, A&M, etc., which speaks to the quality of our program. We are very fortunate of having a very strong and supportive industry advisory group which we call PE-ACE (Petroleum Engineering Advisory Council for Excellence). They have been of tremendous help to us.
So are you happy about coming back to UL?
Yes, of course. It's been very rewarding, and it's allowed me to contribute to the betterment of the Department, our students, and the community.
