Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
MHT's Julie Donnelly: FloDesign Wind Turbine grows in Mass.
MHT's Galen Moore: N.E. firms target individual carbon footprints
When major project leaders and operations managers at British Petroleum are due for professional education, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the go-to resource for BP.
Since 2003, 250 BP leaders have honed their skills on managing risk and challenges through the BP Projects Academy at MIT. Another 64 leaders have graduated from the BP Operations Academy at MIT, which focuses on safety of operations, since 2007.
Both are custom professional ed programs — jointly taught by BP and MIT and funded by BP. In good times for BP, the unique programs were seen as a huge success. But after BP’s oil catastrophe in the Gulf, some at MIT are less sure.
“We have to think about what that implies for us. It also reflects on us — whether or not we have been contributing adequately,” said Donald Lessard, MIT’s faculty director of the BP Projects Academy. “To some extent we’re involved in helping them to improve their practices, so to some extent we’re engaged with them.”
The programs are among several major partnerships between BP and MIT. Another is the MIT Energy Initiative, which BP was the inaugural founding member for in 2006. BP has pledged to fund the project with $25 million over five years.
By all indications, MIT is not planning to re-evaluate its ties with BP. The strength of the relationship underscores the extent to which major corporations and universities have come to rely on each other.
“When the relationships work well and are well managed, it can be a very healthy collaboration,” said Jennifer Washburn, author of the book “University, Inc.”
“But these multi-year deals — that can be a concern,” she said. “There’s a danger that one company can exert too much influence over the research agenda.”
The MIT Energy Initiative includes a clean coal project known as the Advanced Conversion Research Project along with a fellowship program and a seed fund for research projects. The initiative has since won an equal amount of funding from another founding member, Italian oil giant Eni.
Ernest Moniz, director of the Energy Initiative, said MIT and BP have a “very longstanding and important relationship” and that the Gulf situation won’t likely affect the initiative.
“We’re doing basic research on important problems, which (BP) obviously viewed as important for their future,” Moniz said. “To my knowledge, there is no discussion of a change of that work.”
A BP spokesman said the company has an association with MIT dating back to the 1970s, and called MIT “one of BP’s core university partners” in the U.S.
“We don’t expect our relationship with MIT to change as a result of the situation in the Gulf of Mexico,” the spokesman said.
The MIT Energy Initiative is far from the largest U.S. university project getting funding from BP. In 2007, BP announced it would give $500 million to the University of California, Berkeley for an alternative energy research center.
Universities have had relationships with industry since the 1800s, but collaborations on energy have grown substantially in recent decades for two main reasons, according to Washburn. For one, universities doing energy research needed someone to fund them when the federal government wouldn’t. And the energy industry, which spends a proportionately small amount on R&D, was looking to investigate different technologies cheaply and found a willing partner in universities.
At MIT, working with BP is almost certainly done without illusions, said Seth Kaplan, vice president for policy and climate advocacy at the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation.
“There was always the possibility that something like this (oil disaster) could happen,” Kaplan said.
The litmus test is whether MIT is staying true to its own vision and agenda, he said, “and simply using the funds that are provided by a company like BP to pursue that vision and that agenda.” Kaplan said MIT appears to be succeeding in that regard.
The Projects and Operations academies demonstrate a different side of the partnership between MIT and BP.
According to MIT documents, the Projects Academy works to improve the delivery of BP’s major capital projects, while the Operations Academy — founded after a 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas — deals with topics including leadership, risk management and safety.
The Obama administration has held BP officials financially responsible for the April 20 explosion on the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, which caused what authorities say is the largest oil disaster in history.
Lessard, however, said he doesn’t have a better idea than anyone else about whether BP decisions are to blame for the Gulf catastrophe, or about how much it might reflect on MIT’s training programs for BP.
“I will really look forward to the investigation,” he said. “These are open questions to answer.”
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
