New energy exhibit set to open in November

HOUSTON—As the elevator doors open on the fourth floor of Houston Museum of Natural Science, a giant hunk of metal rotates around a pipe, much like a wrench would tighten around a bolt. There's a "whoosh" as machinery turns.

The Houston Chronicle reports the "iron roughneck," as it's known, is a state-of-theart piece of machinery used on offshore drilling rigs, and it's the first thing visitors see when they arrive at the museum's fourth floor and step into the newly retooled Wiess Energy Hall.

The rig is a replica. But Paul Bernhardt wants visitors to see it and imagine they are hundreds of miles off the coast of Texas, standing on a platform anchored to the ocean floor.

"It was tricky, even with some of the connections we have in the energy industry, but we were able to get a couple of team members out on a real rig in the Gulf because we want to be able to recreate an experience for our visitors that few people get to have," said Bernhardt, the consultant hired by the museum to design and build the new space.

The rig is just one of several new exhibits in what museum staff have dubbed "Wiess Energy Hall 3.0." Because the construction has occurred out of public view, not all museum visitors are aware the $40 million project is unfolding above them.

The hall is set to open to the public in November and will quadruple the space reserved for Wiess and represents an exciting—and rare—opportunity for the museum to design a permanent exhibit hall from the ground up.

Museum officials concede the former Wiess Hall had grown a bit tired in recent years. It was last updated in 2004, long before the shale boom and long before renewable energy obtained the foothold that it currently has in the market.

"We had given the former hall a couple tune-ups in the past, but the mandate from the board is not only does the scientific content within each exhibit have to be the latest and greatest, but the technology we use to present those exhibits has to be state of the art," said Joel Bartsch, the museum's president. "And that's what we've done with the new Wiess Hall."

The project was funded as part of a capital campaign launched in 2012 exclusively with the intent of updating Wiess Hall, which was one of the early anchors of the museum when it opened at its current location in 1969. Some of the early iterations of Wiess consisted largely of models of oil derricks, displays of geologic cross sections and pieces of equipment that were so old, many people forgot how they were once used.

Wiess 3.0 is a different story. Not only will it explain the science behind various sources of energy, it will capitalize on new museum display technology, such as touch-screens, high-quality video resolution, and better LED lighting.

While the old hall told the story of energy from "Big Bang to burner tip," Wiess 3.0 will tell an even broader story, meticulously delving into geological processes, discovery, exploration and use of hydrocarbons and renewable forms of energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal.

"Renewables are front and center," said Jeff Poss, the museum's vice president of exhibits and facilities. "They're not hidden in the back."

The team of animators, designers and engineers has gone to great lengths to make sure every detail is painstakingly true to life, consulting with local experts so that everything is accurate, from the color of basalt to the way sedimentary rock is layered.

"Trust me, when you're trying to recreate a rock formation in a town that's full of geologists, you better get it right," Bartsch said.

While some of the Wiess exhibits got a makeover, others are brand new.

Such is the case with the "EFX 3000," otherwise known as the Eagle Ford Shale Experience.

The moving theater—don't call it a ride—will simulate a trip to the South Texas field and down into the bore hole of an oil well. It's a bit of a time machine and drilling adventure wrapped into one experience.

"We take the science and education piece of it very seriously, but we have to make it fun and find a way to spark people's imagination and hope that they want to learn more after they leave the museum," Bartsch said. "It's all incredibly cool."

Also new is "Energy City" a 2,500-square-foot, 3-D landscape representing Houston, the surrounding Gulf coastal waters, and the terrain of southeast Texas.

The milk-white model city is eye-catching. But the magic really happens when the museum staffers turn on a series of projectors that cast images on the models, simulating windows on buildings, turning day to night, and making cars and trains "move" throughout the city.

To come up with the concept, the museum's consultants visited the Minautur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany, for inspiration, but the end result far exceeds similar museum exhibits because of the quality of the 3-D projection, Poss said.

In designing the new hall, Bernhardt and his team visited museums around the country, scouting other energy exhibits. There seems to be one key difference between those and Wiess 3.0., he said.

"This is bigger and better. There's no question about it."