Wayne B. Ingram, a patent-holding offshore oil-field engineer and industry consultant, and former Offshore Technology Conference chair, has died. He was 86.
His journey from earning three degrees at the University of Texas at Austin to possessing a key to the city of Houston (presented in 1980), and forward through years of contributed expertise, seemed not to culminate so much as achieve a perfect plateau.
Ingram, P.E., Ph.D., F.ASCE, had been a practicing engineer in the international offshore oil-field industry since graduating in 1965. His focus was in the areas of foundations and soil mechanics, and his expertise in the performance of axial and lateral foundation elements in marine sediments.
An ASCE life member, he spent 12 years as a civil engineer for Shell Oil and Shell Development Company. He was supervisor of civil engineering research for five of those years, assuming responsibility for foundation, structural, oceanographic, and marine environmental research.
He spent another five years with two consulting engineering firms before starting his own company, Seafloor Engineers Inc., in 1982, which began offering offshore services to the oil industry worldwide. He sold his company to Fugro-McClelland in 1990 and became president of the Fugro-McClelland Marine Geosciences Company in 1991. On retiring in 1993, he formed Ingram Companies in 1994, staying active as an offshore engineering consultant.
Ingram was responsible for the foundation investigation for Shell’s first tension leg platform, Auger, in almost 3,000 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico.
He also authored several papers on the performance of axial and lateral foundation elements in marine sediments, including carbonates, and on the stability of jack-up rig foundations in the marine environment.
He was a fellow emeritus and past president of the Marine Technology Society. He owned three patents on offshore soil-sampling devices and was selected in 1994 as a distinguished engineering graduate of the University of Texas.
Ingram was a volunteer leader in the Offshore Technology Conference during the conference’s early years. OTC was started in 1969 by ASCE and 11 other professional societies. Ingram represented the Society on the OTC board of directors from 1976 to 1980, serving as chair in 1980. He was also on the OTC board from 1984 through 1992 representing MTS.
ASCE’s Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement award for 1995 went to the Auger Tension Leg Platform, for which Ingram was responsible for foundations analysis.
