USF receives $11 million grant to fund BP spill research

Eighteen months after one of the worst oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, researchers at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg are studying the effects of the deep water blowout with the help of an $11 million grant.
Their research aims to determine how the Gulf is recuperating, along with how marine life is adapting after the BP disaster.
"Traditionally, oil spills only affect the surface, making it a two-dimensional phenomenon, chemical oceanographer David Hollander said.
"Though in a deep water spill, not only does oil rise to the surface, a good portion stays in the subsurface. It turns out being not a two-dimensional disaster, but a three-dimensional catastrophe."
Hollander led a USF research group that developed a "chemical fingerprint" of the oil found after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, identifying the oil as coming from BP and debunking company claims that it was naturally occurring.
"This chemical fingerprint was very important," said Jackie Dixon, dean of the College Of Marine Science.
"There is oil entering the Gulf waters continuously through underwater leaks, a few thousand gallons a day, compared to the tens of thousands that was coming from BP's Macondo well."
BP established The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Fund, which awarded $112 million to centers of research in the Gulf states, with $11 million going to the USF-led research consortium Center for Integrated Modeling and Analysis of the Gulf Ecosystem, or C-IMAGE.
The C-IMAGE proposal was one of eight selected from 77 proposed nationwide centers.
About half of the $11 million will go to USF researchers, while the other half will go to their C-IMAGE partners in The Netherlands, Germany, Canada, California and Texas over the next three years, Dixon said.
"We put together the best team of scientists we could find," Dixon said. No one knew what was going to happen, where it was going to go and what the impact was going to be. Something like this can easily happen again, so we want to be better prepared in the future," Dixon said.
The fund set up an executive advisory board that proposed five themes detailing what research they believed to be most valuable. This created a separation from BP's influence.
"The beauty of the GRI funding of these centers is that there is no direct attachment to BP," Hollander said.
"It creates an opportunity for a variety of scientists to research without the possibility of there being any control by the oil company on the kind of results being generated or on the kind of research being proposed or funded."
More than a dozen scientists from USF serve as principal investigators on the research, most from the College of Marine Science and others from the College of Engineering.