Safety has long been a priority for the global oil and gas industry, but it moved onto center stage nationally in the US following the Macondo incident in the Gulf of Mexico. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) was formed from the Minerals Management Service following the event and took on the responsibility of overseeing the safe and environmentally responsible development of energy and mineral resources on the US Outer Continental Shelf.

The BOEMRE has led some of the most aggressive and comprehensive reforms to offshore oil and gas regulation and oversight in US history. These reforms, which strengthen requirements from well design and workplace safety to corporate accountability, are being pursued with the goal of ensuring the US can safely and responsibly develop its energy resources.

In working toward this goal, BOEMRE recently announced that it would employ multidisciplinary teams instead of individual inspectors to carry out inspections on offshore oil and gas facilities. While this approach will be more thorough, it presents a challenge because it requires additional human resources from an industry in which human resources are extremely limited.

Fortunately, there may well be a host of qualified understudies waiting in the wings.

As the Space Shuttle program winds down at NASA, there are thousands of technicians, engineers, and scientists who will be laid off. According to Emil Pe?a, executive director of the National Corrosion Center at Rice University, this is a skilled workforce that could – with some training – step into the roles that need to be filled by the BOEMRE.

The goal of transferring technology in the form of human capital was the impetus behind the formation over the last two months of the Energy Safety Institute (ESI).

Pe?a, who was instrumental in the creation of ESI under the umbrella of the Greater Houston Partnership, said preserving human resources is one of the key objectives of the institute. “One of ESI’s primary goals is to facilitate technology transfer by moving people from their roles in SRQA (safety, reliability, quality assurance) at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) into new roles with the BOEMRE.”

ESI is basically about technology, Pe?a said. “You can transfer some of this technology, and there also is the opportunity of utilizing some of the assets that are available at JSC, such as labs, buildings, test facilities, and other resources.”

Pe?a believes using JSC to transfer knowledge from the space program to energy, whether it is ocean or land, is a win-win situation because it allows SRQA programs developed for the space program to be refocused on an industry that is comparably challenging in terms of safety.

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