Industry support key to research, says top scientist

AT 35, Eric May has achieved more than many academics will do over a lifetime.

As a PhD engineering student at the University of Western Australia, his research resulted in an international patent for an instrument he invented to measure thermodynamic properties of gas condensates.

In 2009, aged 32, he became the youngest professor at any Australian university when he was made Chevron chair in gas processing engineering at UWA. The following year he was named WA's early career scientist of the year.

Last week, Professor May was presented with the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for physical scientist of the year by Prime Minister Julia Gillard at a ceremony in Canberra.

The award recognised his outstanding contributions toward helping to make liquefied natural gas production cleaner and more efficient.

Chevron has also acknowledged the achievements of Professor May and his team, recently announcing a $5.75 million five-year fixed-term agreement to endow the chair in perpetuity as part of its global University Partnership Program.

Such partnerships play a vital role in getting major research projects off the ground, Professor May told WA Business News.

“UWA does have some very strong links with industry but it needs to continue to grow them, as do all universities in Australia,” he said. “To achieve the scale of research that’s needed for industry to benefit from, industry needs to help provide the resources that are needed to do it.

“The capability of the universities and the willingness for the partnership is definitely there and I hope that the government can come up with incentives to encourage this even more than has happened in the past, because it is one of the ways in which future large-scale research is going to happen at universities.” Professor May’s research is centred on the process of geosequestration, in which carbon dioxide is extracted from the raw gas and reinjected deep into the ground to prevent it from being emitted into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gas pollution.

“In the old days they would just vent that back into the atmosphere but another alternative is to sequester it back into the reservoir and try and use that C02 to accelerate the gas production,” he said.

“That’s advantageous because it gives you an economic incentive to do the sequestration (as) you get a faster rate of return on the investment.”

Professor May’s studies extend to removing unwanted nitrogen from LNG and developing more efficient separation technologies in order to reduce the amount of energy required in production.

The gradual shift from coal to gas as Australia’s primary energy source would have significant environmental benefits, he said, citing as an example a reduction in C02 emissions in the United States from pre-Kyoto Protocol levels to their current state.

“The industry in Western Australia is probably leading the world in making sure that the environmental impact of gas and LNG production is continually being rmnimised and that’s a very good sign,” Professor May said.

Having completed his bachelor’s degree and PhD, Professor May attended the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US as a post-doctoral research fellow, before returning to UWA. as a lecturer in 2005.

He said he had been interested in generating his own research since his undergraduate days but that his work as a mentor to a new generation of researchers was what kept him in academia.

“This is a very important time in terms of humanity’s growth and its wealth and taking stewardship of the environment,” he said.

“Being able to guide the engineers that will help us do that over the next few decades is a very rewarding experience.”

Tertiary experts have predicted that partnerships between industry and universities will become more frequent as the higher education sector evolves.

Locally, resources and energy companies have led the way in establishing such ties, with Chevron, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton pitching their financial support behind engineering faculties in recent years.