Turning research into response: improving oil spill readiness through science
Technical advances are often made through key industry-academic alliances in a diverse range of engineering, medical and scientific disciplines.
Oil spill response studies are no stranger to research programmes and have advanced our knowledge, understanding and capability over the last 50 years.
Oil spill response personnel typically focus on the overarching operational considerations that maximise effectiveness when selecting techniques that together comprise the response strategy to mitigate any given spill scenario. Research scientists, conversely, may focus on a much more detailed aspect of the spill, which may have limited immediate operational relevance to the clean-up effort.
Bridging this gap between operational relevance and the scientific focus can be enabled by linking response scientists with the academic research programme to inject an element of "operational realism" with the aim of producing outputs of direct relevance and application to push the boundaries of future spill response techniques and capability.
