Narragansett firm gauges ecological threats

By Mike Colias
Providence Business News, Vol. 18, Number 24
09/29/03

Last Nov. 13, a storm-battered oil tanker named Prestige, carrying roughly 20 million gallons of oil in its belly, began to leak off the coast of Spain.

Spanish officials decided to tow the vessel offshore, where, on Nov. 19, it broke in two and foundered in 2-mile deep waters – but not before spilling more than 2 million gallons.

Underwater images from a French submarine revealed ribbons of tar-like oil bubbling toward the surface from a number of cracks in the sunken vessel’s hull, threatening to blanket Spain’s Galice coast in black sludge.

Enter Applied Science Associates, a Narragansett company that uses computer models to forecast how and where an oil spill will spread.

The company’s modeling system takes myriad data – currents, tides, weather patterns, wind speed and direction, water temperature and salinity – and crunches them together, rendering a three-dimensional map of a spill. The result is a Windows-based, real-time system to monitor oil spills and predict their movement.

The system has been used to assist in the planning of environmental cleanup efforts, for example. In the case of the Prestige spill, ASA’s model showed that the oil would take about five days to reach the sea surface and another week to reach the shoreline.

ASA was founded in 1979, a spin off from environmental research at the University of Rhode Island. Malcolm Spaulding, a URI professor of ocean engineering, co-founded the company and still serves as a senior advisor.

“Most of the environmental modeling work we did then was on mainframe computers and punchcards,” Spaulding said. “The PC has revolutionized the business, leading to large increases in capabilities and reductions in cost.”

In 1984, ASA was hired by The Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which operates the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, to write the first-ever PC-based oil spill response system.

Today, roughly 40 percent of the company’s revenue – about $4 million in 2002 – represents sales to the oil and gas industries, according to Eoin Howlett, the chief executive officer of ASA.

The company’s computer modeling also is used for environmental-impact analysis, providing “what if” scenarios for predicting the ecological effects of, say, a new bridge or a dredging project.

For example, ASA provided a number of models forecasting water-quality impacts if a container port had been constructed at Quonset Point.

It also has provided services to the Narragansett Bay Commission to study the effects of its combined sewer overflow project. ASA can plug in scenarios of rainfall and subsequent bacteria that would flow into the bay, and project what the impact would be on shellfishing, for example.

ASA also has provided modeling to the owners of the Brayton Point power plant in Somerset, Mass., which has been cited by environmental regulators for discharging hot water into Mount Hope Bay. ASA’s model can determine, for example, what the ecological effect would be if the discharge temperature were reduced by a degree or two.

Over the past few years, ASA has developed new programs aimed at two growing markets: port security and search and rescue.

This year the firm has developed a new “crisis management software” application for the U.S. Coast Guard. The product offers the ability to track the movement and impacts of released pollutants from a security breach – a bioterrorist attack at a large port, for example.

And the company has designed search-and-rescue programs for port authorities in Spain, Singapore and Hong Kong.

“Search and rescue is really a growing area for us,” Howlett said.

ASA now has about 40 employees, most of them with degrees in engineering, oceanography, geology or computer science from URI, Brown University, MIT and other schools. It has offices in Brazil, Australia and Europe.