UH’s director of the Professional Geoscience Program was honored for his effort to inform the public during the oil well blowout in 2010 and receiving the Public Service Award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
Don Van Nieuwenhuise was chosen based on his willingness to go the extra mile when it comes to public affairs.
The Macondo Well, which ruptured because of an explosion on the off-shore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, was the cause of the largest oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. Though oil giant British Petroleum successfully capped and sealed the well in the following months, the damage already done was severe.
After watching several news reports, Van Nieuwenhuise said he was surprised by how over-exaggerated claims about the well blowout were and felt obligated to set the records straight.
“As someone from a university, I thought information was the main thing I could provide,” he said.
Van Nieuwenhuise said he recalls the countless interviews he fielded as an oil well expert. Though he said expert might be overstating the fact, it is somewhat accurate. In the 1970s, Van Nieuwenhuise worked with Mobil, personally overseeing the drilling and excavation of 15 separate wells; in addition, Van Nieuwenhuise had been teaching petroleum engineering courses at Tulane University prior to becoming a program director at UH.
Though slow at first, Van Nieuwenhuise said he remembers the sharp increase in his interviews after his debut on Houston CBS affiliate, KHOU.
“The next guy had me on, and the next guy had me on, and I had four interviews on CNN that day. Then 40 interviews on CNN and then national news and a few local,” Van Nieuwenhuise said.
Though the interviews died down for a while, when BP began introducing new solutions to cap the wellhead, the media once again turned to Van Nieuwenhuise, with journalists and the public waiting for his expertise in confirming or debunking the proposed solutions.
What was perhaps most surprising to Van Nieuwenhuise was how outrageous some theories were in regards to the spill and the clean-up process.
“One of them was that the blowout was going to last forever, and that is was a terrible disaster that would never go away,” Van Nieuwenhuise said.
Least surprising, Van Nieuwenhuise said, was that the AAPG took three years to give him his award. In fact, at a recent meeting, fellow AAPG colleagues told Van Nieuwenhuise they had wanted to give him the award sooner, and they hoped that late would be better than not at all.
“Are you kidding? You can give it to me any time, and I’ll take it,” Van Nieuwenhuise said.
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