What makes a good reservoir?

Project Summary

David Clancy, a Stats/Math/EnvSci major, and Tianyi Mu, an ECE/CompSci major, spent ten weeks studying the effects of weather, surroundings, and climate on the operational behavior of water reservoirs across the United States. They used a large dataset compiled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and they worked closely with Lauren Patterson from the Water Policy Program at Duke's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. Project mentorship was provided by Alireza Vahid, a postdoctoral candidate in Electrical Engineering.

Themes and Categories
Energy & Environment
Data+
Year
2015
Contact
Paul Bendich
bendich@math.duke.edu

Project Results

Using sophisticated statistical machinery, the team showed that greater forestation and less-dense development increases the influence of rain on a reservoir. They also proposed a novel way to identify and characterize extreme reservoir events.

David explains the project at the Data+ poster session

Download the executive summary (PDF).

Disciplines Involved

  • Environmental Science
  • Statistics

Project Team

Undergraduates: Tianyi Mu and David Clancy

Clients:

Lead mentor: Alireza Vahid, post-doc, ECE

Graduate mentor: Hamza Ghadyali graduate student, Mathematics

Related People

Related Projects

Getting Granular on Social Determinants of Health

Social and environmental contexts are increasingly recognized as factors that impact health outcomes of patients. This team will have the opportunity to collaborate directly with clinicians and medical data in a real-world setting. They will examine the association between social determinants with risk prediction for hospital admissions, and to assess whether social determinants bias that risk in a systematic way. Applied methods will include machine learning, risk prediction, and assessment of bias. This Data+ project is sponsored by the Forge, Duke's center for actionable data science.

Project Leads: Shelly Rusincovitch, Ricardo Henao, Azalea Kim

Project Manager: TBD

Investigating oil and gas production in the United Kingdom

Producing oil and gas in the North Sea, off the coast of the United Kingdom, requires a lease to extract resources from beneath the ocean floor and companies bid for those rights. This team will consult with professionals at ExxonMobil to understand why these leases are acquired and who benefits. This requires historical data on bid history to investigate what leads to an increase in the number of (a) leases acquired and (b) companies participating in auctions. The goal of this team is to create a well-structured dataset based on company bid history from the U.K. Oil and Gas Authority; data which will come from many different file structures and formats (tabular, pdf, etc.). The team will curate these data to create a single, tabular database of U.K. bid history and work programs.

On the Shelf: exploring oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico

Producing oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico requires rights to extract these resources from beneath the ocean floor and companies bid into the market for those rights. The top bids are sometimes significantly larger than the next highest bids, but it’s not always clear why this differential exists and some companies seemingly overbid by large margins. This team will consult with professionals at ExxonMobil to curate and analyze historical bid data from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that contains information on company bid history, infrastructure, wells, and seismic survey data as well as data from the companies themselves and geopolitical events. The stretch goal of the team will be to see if they can uncover the rationale behind historic bidding patterns. What do the highest bidders know that other bidders to not (if anything)? What characteristics might incentivize overbidding to minimize the risk of losing the right to produce (i.e. ambiguity aversion)?