Caroline Joseph corrosion testing project

This was one that Caroline Joseph, who took this class a couple years ago, brought back from a summer where she worked at Exxon — I think it was Exxon. She was down in Houston with an oil company, and somewhere they discovered oil but it was, I believe, sour oil. What's sour oil? Sour gas means it has hydrogen sulfide in it. Hydrogen sulfide is toxic. It numbs the nerves in the nose. It puts your nose to sleep and you just die from hydrogen sulfide poisoning. In the southwest corner of Wyoming, you go through this rangeland, they'll have signs saying H2S — they have fourteen percent H2S in the gas in the ground there. And the cows have to be very careful about what they breathe, because some of it leaks up through the ground after they drilled all these holes.

Student LGO internship at a Houston oil company. Corrosion analysis correctly recommended clad pipe, but the project was canceled for external reasons: host-country offset requirements and local-worker employment quotas.

I now have an assignment for all of you on externalities. If anyone has their own externality story where something didn't get done — if you can think of an externality story I'd love to collect them. Here's one from Caroline Joseph; I think she's a second-year graduate student now. When she did her internship project as an undergraduate she went down to one of the oil companies in Houston. She took this course, and I said the same thing — anyone have an externality story? For her internship she was supposed to be looking at corrosion tests of clad pipe. They wanted to do an oil project in some country — she didn't tell me the country, and I don't care about the country for this purpose. She was supposed to be looking at the corrosive nature of this oil or gas field and try to determine — material selection problem — should they use regular old carbon or alloy steel, which would corrode in this environment, or should they use more expensive clad pipe. That was the question being posed to her as part of her internship.