John Halkyard

Dr. Halkyard has over thirty years in the development and successful implementation of novel deep-water oil & gas production and drilling facilities, including the first floating production system in the Gulf of Mexico and the award-winning spar drilling and production platform. In recent years, Dr. Halkyard returned his attention to ocean mining as Chief Technical Advisor for Technip USA, Inc., a major international offshore engineering company, and as the founder of the ocean mining consultancy, Deep Reach Technology, Inc. (DRT) and Ocean Minerals, LLC.

Dr. Halkyard was hired by Kennecott Exploration, Inc. to lead their ocean mining system development efforts, where he built a staff of over 25 scientists and engineers, and numerous contractors to execute the development program. He helped established laboratory facilities in La Jolla, California including a simulated seabed area for testing collectors and various specialized facilities for testing the mining and lifting processes. He also planned and executed six expeditions in Kennecott’s CCZ mine site (USA Area 4) to collect engineering and exploration data, and initiated and executed specific successful development activities, including:

• Instrumented towing of pipe sections to evaluate on bottom towing forces
• Designed a specialized bottom towed sled with three differently loaded wheels to measure trafficability parameters (Bekker Values) for sled and tracked vehicle design
• Designed and built a free fall cone penetrometer to measure soil strength
• Participated in nodule dredging of 200 tons of nodules in one 38 day cruise Served as Chief Scientist on two exploration cruises using box corers and FG samplers to establish a high-fidelity resource estimate

He planned and led a program to prove the performance of a nodule collector, which involved two years of land-based testing and a successful deep-sea test of a prototype collector in the Kennecott mine site of the CCZ (Heine & Suh, 1978).

Dr. Halkyard initiated a program to design, analyze and test various riser and lift systems including the largest airlift test conducted to date, and developed the theory of a “froth flow” airlift system that is comparable in efficiency to submerged pumps (Doyle & Halkyard).

In 1978, Dr. Halkyard became Secretary of the Kennecott Consortium and was responsible for managing the consortium’s bankable feasibility study conducted by Bechtel Corporation, with assistance from Global Marine Development Company. This involved preparing detailed cost estimates for the offshore and onshore facilities. Bechtel studied onshore facilities in both the U.S. and Mexico. Dr. Halkyard met personally with representatives of Bechtel and the Minister of Patrimony of Mexico to negotiate terms for siting the nodule process facility in Mexico.

The Kennecott Consortium ceased activities in 1981 following the Law of the Sea Convention. Dr. Halkyard continued consulting for Kennecott related to its application for a mine site under U.S. Legislation and conducted a significant study for the University of Hawaii and the U.S. Minerals Management Service on the Technology for Mining of Cobalt Rich Manganese Crusts from Seamounts (Halkyard, 1985).

In 2004, Dr. Halkyard, as Chief Research Advisor for Technip USA, was responsible for the deep-sea mining Scoping Study for Nautilus Minerals Solwara 1 Project.

In 2010, Dr. Halkyard along with colleagues applied for and were later awarded a patent for a method to extract seafloor massive sulfides that does not require the use of seafloor crawler vehicles. This led to the formation of DRT. Between 2010 and the present DRT has been engaged by several other ocean mining ventures for consulting and performing scoping studies, including the multi-year Army Research Lab Cooperative Research Agreement on seabed extraction of rare earth elements which brought him to the Cook Islands in the first place.

In addition to founding OML and serving as President and Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Halkyard is also Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for DRT. and President of John Halkyard & Associates, LLC Consulting Offshore Engineers, Houston, Texas USA.

Since his retirement from Technip, Dr. Halkyard has served as visiting lecturer and professor at several universities, including the University of Western Australia, National University of Singapore (2007–2014), Harbin Engineering University, China (2008–2011), and the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia (2015 – present). He is a past member of the Marine Board of the National Research Council, for the National Academy of Engineering, a registered Mechanical Engineer, a Life Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a Fellow of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, a member of SME and a Qualified Person under the NI 43-101 Canadian Mining Code. He served on the Board of Directors for ASME-International Petroleum Technology Institute, as Chairman of the Executive Committee/Offshore for the Ocean and Arctic Engineering Division of ASME, and Section Chair for the Marine Technology Society. He also serves on the academic review committees for the University of Hawaii and held a similar position in the past for the U. S. Naval Academy.

Dr. Halkyard has published two books, has authored chapters in several others, and has published numerous refereed articles in conference proceedings and journals on ocean engineering, ocean mining, and related topics. His book on Floating Structure Design and Analysis is used by several universities as a textbook.

Dr. Halkyard holds a B.S. in Engineering Science from Purdue University, an M.S. in Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an Sc.D. in Ocean Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.