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Competitive Academic Agreement Program (CAAP)
In 2013, PHMSA’s Pipeline Safety Research Program implemented
a new program entitled CAAP breathing further innovation into
pipeline safety research. CAAP targets University students for the
future pipeline safety workforce. PHMSA’s initial vision for
this program was to select 5 or more awards annually utilizing
$100,000 PHMSA plus a 30% cost sharing by our university partners
per project. With congressional assistance, PHMSA then revised this
strategy in 2015 in order to award up to $2 million a year in this
program which corresponds to $300,000 per project at a university
cost sharing level of 20% per project. These are Cooperative
Agreements that are competitively selected and can run up to 36
months in duration. However, the number of awards are dependent upon
quality of submissions and budget limitations. These initiatives are
intended to research a wide set of solutions for many known pipeline
integrity challenges.
The CAAP is intended to spur innovation through enabling an academic
research focus on high risk and high pay-off solutions for wide
ranging pipeline safety challenges. The CAAP is different in focus,
execution and reporting than PHMSA’s core program on Pipeline
Safety Research. It is intended to potentially deliver desired
solutions that can be a “handed-off” to further
investigations in CAAP or in PHMSA’s core research program
that employs partnerships with a variety of public/private
organizations. One goal in this strategy would be to validate proof
of concept of a thesis or theory potentially all the way to
commercial penetration into the market.
Another goal for CAAP is to expose graduate and PhD research
students to subject matter common to pipeline safety challenges for
illustrating how their engineering or technical discipline is highly
desired and needed in the pipeline field. The pipeline industry and
federal/state regulators are all experiencing low numbers of entry
level applications to positions that are engineering or technically
focused. Public conferences, meetings and journals have identified
similar shortfalls. The ultimate benefits from this goal would be to
reflect new talent in all aspects of pipelining similar to how
programs at other Federal Agencies and non-profit organizations have
provided talent to other industries over time.
Summary De-Brief Presentation:
Submitting Superior CAAP Applications
Click
here to
view the National policies for CAAP recipient compliance.
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