Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, Roland Horne, a professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, started hearing his phone ring more often.

“As a petroleum engineer at Stanford, as soon as the event happened, I started getting calls from newspapers who wanted to know what it meant and what I thought about it,” Horne said. “I was kind of obliged to figure out exactly what had happened, so I could respond intelligently to people who asked.”

That research was put on public display Tuesday evening when Horne spoke in Hewlett Auditorium as the first lecturer in a two-part series entitled, “The Deepwater Horizon Disaster and the Future of Oil Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.” The series aims to answer three fundamental questions about the catastrophe: how did it happen, why are we drilling in the Gulf of Mexico at all and what are some of the long-term consequences of the spill?

Tuesday’s talk focused on tackling the first of these.

Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences and the driving force behind the lecture series, started off the night by providing an overview of the catastrophe.

Eleven workers were killed in the explosion. An estimated 185 million gallons of crude oil were spilled into the Gulf of Mexico when the well was capped almost two months later, but it took another two months for the federal government to declare the well effectively dead on Sept. 19.

Horne structured his lecture in four parts. He talked about the technology behind deepwater oil drilling, described some of the questionable issues surrounding this practice, listed the principal events that caused the gulf spill to happen and stated some of the measures being taken to prevent a similar spill from happening in the future.

He said that the goal of the talk was not to fault any one party for the spill but instead to discuss the technical issues that caused it to happen in the first place.

When Horne used a slide from a presentation by Halliburton, an oil field corporation, he said that he changed the wording slightly because it was accusing someone else for being responsible.

“I took the name of who they were accusing out,” Horne said. “We are interested only in the technical issues here. I’m not intending to talk about who is [to] blame for anything tonight, so you can make your own decisions about that.”

Horne said that one-eighth of the oil used by Americans comes from deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, making it difficult to cut out on deepwater drilling completely. He also said that in the last ten years, there have been almost 2,000 deepwater wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico. One has led to a catastrophe.

“You’ll notice I didn’t say only one,” Horne said, “because I don’t want to imply that one is a small number…it should be none out of 2,000. What we need to learn from this accident is how to prevent this from ever happening again.”

Anthea Doridis, a resident of Palo Alto, came to the presentation to get a better understanding of the oil spill.

“It’s one of the biggest oil spills in American history, so I wanted to understand why it happened,” Doridis said.

Alfred Sporrman, a professor chemical engineering and environmental engineering, said he was impressed that Horne gave an objective overview of the catastrophe.

“It was really good to see an expert opinion who puts all of these different facts together, which you don’t see in newspapers,” Spormann said.

The second part of the series will take place on Nov. 30 at 7:30 p.m. in Hewlett Auditorium with Mark Zoback, professor in the Department of Geophysics, speaking about the role of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, and Meg Caldwell, co-director of the Center for Ocean Solutions and faculty member at the Law School, talking about the impact of the spill and regulatory reform.