Rice students win BP’s engineering prize for water treatment in refineries

A team of three engineering students from Rice University in Houston has won the US leg of BP’s Ultimate Field Trip competition.

The Ultimate Field Trip is a global competition where the winning teams from each participating country will spend two weeks experiencing life with BP, the company said. 

Last fall, BP asked university students from across the country to identify and develop a novel technical solution that would reduce the amount of water utilized and/or find an effective use for water produced from operations.

The Rice students, who prevailed over competitors from six other US universities, developed a plan that would grow microalgae capable of utilizing waste nutrients in order to purify refinery wastewater.

As the grand prize winners, the Rice team of Benjamin Zhang, Sun Ji and Ruth Long, will visit Trinidad and Tobago in July and tour BP’s two onshore facilities, an offshore platform, and complete the Tropical Basic Offshore Safety Induction alongside the winning teams from the UK, Angola and Canada. 

“At BP, we place a premium on innovation, teamwork and the thinking that keeps us at the forefront of technology," said Khymberly Booth, BP’s US university relations director. "Team Owls displayed all of those characteristics and more as they offered a realistic and feasible solution to our water challenge and emerged as the clear winners in this elite competition.”