UCLA Garrick Risk Institute Awarded $15 million in Federal, State and Utility Funding for Safety and Sustainability Assessments

The California Energy Commission, Caltrans, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and PG&E have collectively awarded $15.4 million in research funding to The B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. 

Public and private sector partners have provided additional matching funds of nearly $3 million to support these projects, making it a total of more than $18 million in recent grants and contracts awarded to the institute.

“The funding will help support projects designed to address a broad range of issues critical to the safety and sustainability of the U.S. infrastructure and energy portfolio, including hydrogen, natural gas and nuclear power,” said Ali Mosleh, director of the Garrick Risk Institute and UCLA’s Evalyn Knight Chair in Engineering. “A comprehensive assessment of where these infrastructure projects are and where they need to be — in terms of their safety, operational readiness and long-term sustainability — will inform the agencies and policymakers as they move forward with their planning.”

Among the various grants received by the institute are two awards from the California Energy Commission (CEC). The first award will provide $5.7 million in funding over three years to support testing and safety assessments of incorporating hydrogen gas into California’s natural gas pipeline network, with the aim of helping meet the state’s decarbonization goals. The multidisciplinary project also involves researchers from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, UC Irvine, Sandia National Laboratory and several California utility companies.  

“The project’s scope includes extensive large-scale testing, modeling and simulation, as well as techno-economic analysis,” said Mosleh, a distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA Samueli and the project’s principal investigator. “We will help assess the current industry and infrastructure’s readiness for hydrogen blending.” Mosleh also holds appointments in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, as well as Electrical and Computer Engineering.

A second CEC award, worth $3 million, will support the Garrick Risk Institute’s effort to lead a system-wide assessment of the seismic risk to major natural gas pipelines. The three-year research project will examine various sensor technologies through extensive simulations to develop a platform that assesses seismic risk in real time. 

“The funding will help support projects designed to address a broad range of issues critical to the safety and sustainability of the U.S. infrastructure and energy portfolio, including hydrogen, natural gas and nuclear power,” said Ali Mosleh.

“Real-time assessment of safety and reliability of major natural gas transmission infrastructure is important for the communities so they can better prepare for, and respond to, a major seismic event,” said Yousef Bozorgnia, a UCLA Samueli professor of civil and environmental engineering and the project’s principal investigator. “This is a follow-up of an existing $3.5 million research project on seismic risk analysis of natural gas infrastructure.” Bozorgnia is also the project investigator of the existing project, which is coordinated by the Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3), a multidisciplinary and multi-campus research center within the Garrick Risk Institute at UCLA.

In addition to the pair of CEC research contracts, the Garrick Risk Institute has also received the following new contracts and grants:

• The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) awarded a $1.5 million contract for a technical review of wildfire mitigation plans. Principal investigator: Ali Mosleh
• The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $1.2 million grant to study nuclear power plant operators’ responses during major accidents. Principal investigator: Ali Mosleh
• The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a second grant, also worth $1.2 million, to evaluate safety, reliability and economic implications of electrolysis for hydrogen production at nuclear power plants. Principal investigator: Enrique Lopez Droguett, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA Samueli and director of the Center for Reliability Engineering within the UCLA Garrick Risk Institute
• The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission awarded a contract for $500,000 to develop methods for dealing with uncertainties in risk analysis. Principal investigator: Ali Mosleh 
• The California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, has awarded the institute’s NHR3 Center a $1.65 million grant to conduct a seismic hazard analysis for the state’s bridge infrastructure. Principal investigator: Yousef Bozorgnia
• The Garrick Risk Institute is also working on several other recent projects supported by more than $650,000 in funding from different sources to study automated vehicle safety, non-metallic pipeline integrity and human reliability.