The American Petroleum Institute had Margot Gerritsen, Assistant Professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University out to tour the Shell Brutus drilling and production platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Part of Professor Gerritsen’s work is the Smart Energy series of videos that Stanford provides for anyone to view and I take it Professor Gerritsen is the leader. I previously met Clay Hamilton who missed the Shell Brutus trip due to the airline letting him down, and a student, Luke Leaver from New Zealand on the Conoco Phillips Billings Refinery tour. Somehow Professor Gerritsen managed to assemble the flash movie with a little handheld Canon camera.

Shells Brutus Oil Platform

Shells Brutus Oil Platform

I have also been on conference calls with Professor Gerritsen in attendance. She is sharp, as you’ll see from the video. As a European from a strong Dutch family in a “man’s industry” involved in primarily mathematics, the perspective of the video is quite informative in a down to earth way about what happens on a drilling and production platform without a lot of techno jargon.

Margot Gerritsen

There is also a wealth of information about other topics on the Smart Energy Site. I haven’t watched them all, so I’m reserving an endorsement, but in this case the professor has done a nice job showing us what see she saw. I almost wish that someone of this quality and skill would do a much more thorough video. Having been to the Chevron Blind Faith platform, a production only rig, for their tour, a more thorough a video would give the curious American voters and consumers a great idea of just what is involved.

That, having a sense of what’s involved would provide a superb opportunity, as tens of millions of tours isn’t going to happen, to solve some of the public ignorance exploited by media, special interests and people whose views oppose producing fuels from the U.S. last great resource. In my experience the Chevron and Conoco Phillips people did a great job of getting across the activities involved in getting gas to come out of the pumps.

This video is centered on the people and their activity on the platform. At less than 17 minutes and far better quality that I had expected from such a little camera, it’s a few minutes well spent. I’m impressed!

Sorry, no embed to the video page, but the link goes to the Stanford University Smart Energy site.

Here is Professor Gerritsen’s page.

This is the page where the Smart Energy Show starts with some six pages of video to view.

The only caveat is that global warming with perhaps with a bit of political correctness is lurking so keep a little suspicious squint handy. It’s from a university after all.


Comments

5 Comments so far

  1. student scholarship on November 8, 2010 7:37 AM

    Valuable info. Lucky me I found your site by accident, I bookmarked it.

  2. get free iPads on July 16, 2011 3:02 AM

    Wonderful work! This is the type of info that should be shared around the net. Shame on the search engines for no longer positioning this put up higher! Come on over and seek advice from my web site . Thanks =)

  3. mypad media on August 10, 2011 12:48 PM

    Just want to say your article is as astounding. The clarity on your put up is just nice and i can assume you are knowledgeable on this subject. Fine with your permission let me to clutch your RSS feed to keep updated with forthcoming post. Thank you a million and please keep up the enjoyable work.

  4. used cars websites on June 24, 2013 2:26 PM

    Hi mates, fastidious post and pleasant arguments commented at this place, I am in fact enjoying by these.

  5. Samual on November 21, 2013 10:20 PM

    Its like you read my thoughts! You seem to know a lot about this, like
    you wrote the ebook in it or something. I believe that you could do with a few p.c.
    to drive the message house a bit, however instead of
    that, this is fantastic blog. A great read.
    I will certainly be back.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

css.php