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Cloth Successfully Separates Oil From Gulf Water
Chinobi writes "Di Gao, an assistant professor at the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, has developed a method of separating oil from water within just seconds using a cotton cloth coated in a chemical polymer that makes it both hydrophilic (it bonds with the hydrogen atoms in water) and oleophobic (oil-repelling), making it absolutely perfect for blocking oil and letting water pass through. Gao tested his filter successfully on Gulf Oil water and oil and has an impressive video to demonstrate the results." This is a laboratory demonstration; the technology hasn't been tested at scale.
Now how about we figure out a way to clean up the marshes that got fucked with an oil-slicked spiked baseball bat?
Living With a Nerd
...Unfortunately there will be a next time.
Doing it on a massive scale in the Gulf of Mexico is something else entirely.
While this might prove useful in future spills, it would seem to me to be very unlikely that it could be brought up to scale fast enough to help with the current problem
This ain't rocket surgery.
I would think what you want for an oil cleanup is a material that is oleophilic but hydrophobic,IOW, just the opposite. Dip it in the water, oil sticks, pull it out, oil stays in, water rolls off. Squeeze the oil out into an appropriate receptacle, repeat.
Is this really any more practical than any other methods? There are plenty of ways of separating oil and water, but to do it on such a large scale as the gulf of Mexico is a different animal altogether. At least with the "hillbilly hay" idea it was an easily obtainable substance (farmers make a lot of hay each year), but what about this? How easily can this polymer be mass produced in quantities that would be necessary to clean up the gulf?
If it's fixed, we won't be able to get rich quick turning tarballs into, basically, gold!
I worked in the oil industry in the 80's and 90's (for Amoco coincidentally) and we had adsorbent spill control diapers and booms that we could run through a ringer to extract the oil. Every facility had a stockpile of these things.
I took an oil spill control class in Pueblo Co one year and we trained on boom deployment, oil recovery and cleanup. This was one of the tools we had available to us.
Now maybe the hype is that these new products are made of treated cotton (sounds nice and eco-friendly). Once anything picks up oil it is not so eco-friendly and just becomes another piece of hazardous waste.
Tisha Hayes
Is there a reason this wouldn't act like a giant net and trap life forms in what they intend to be pure crude oil?
Won't somebody think of the childr... I mean, won't somebody think of the dolphins?
Please stop pluralizing words with an apostrophe. That is not what it is there for.
If you use the cloth as an oil-sponge, then the amount of oil you can pick up is limited by the absorbency of the cloth. Any excess oil will seep through the cloth and continue polluting the water. The practicality of just squeezing it out is also questionable, since you have to do it every time the cloth becomes oil-logged (which would be very quick).
If instead it's an oil filter, then you can put as much oil-laden water through it as you want, with the oil remaining on one side, with the cloth absorbing some water and the rest passing through. For example you could pump the oil-water mix into a tank with a funnel in the bottom with this cloth as a barrier. In goes oil and water, out comes just water, with the amount of oil you can separate with a single cloth being limited only by the size of the oil container and perhaps the strength of the cloth.
Absorption isn't bad if it's practical, like the use of hair clippings to soak up oil. But as that example shows, you naturally need much more material to deal with the same amount of oil.
The enemies of Democracy are
Hair works too.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/people-giving-hair-off-their-heads-for-oil-cleanup-2010-05-11
I didn't mention this before because I figured there was a problem with this but it occurred to me if they had a set of wide rollers they could attach rugs or such to a wide belt of some sort that could be attached to the front of a ship and the belt would rotate out into the water, collecting oil and pass through a couple rollers that would squeeze most of the oil out, and that part would pass back into the water to lap up more oil. The oil collected could then be processed and used. I figure I might as well mention it now, though I have doubts it would really work, but who knows. I don't.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
Maybe something more along the lines of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W8_GpMz9nI
Can we all agree that separating oil and water isn't all that difficult? I mean just the plastic tub he poured it in held a lot of the oil while letting the water pour out. Right now in my fridge I'm separating oil and water in my Good Seasons Italian Dressing Cruet (tm). The issue is doing it to the entire gulf of Mexico.
When I see someone clean up a swimming pool in 1 second with a flick of their wrist, then I'll be impressed, but this... not so much.
Obviously (if tests prove successful) BP will be buying this stuff by the boat-load. By successfully separating the oil to a (most likely) usable state they can recoup all that oil they lost into that darned ocean.
That damned water is contaminating our profits!
Then theoretically, any enterprising shrimp boat captain with this filter and a floating storage tank could sop up the stuff and sell it at spot price to a competitor of BP (Insert evil grin here).
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The easy oil is gone, they're having to drill in 5000 feet of water now, so of course there will be a next time.
Deleted
Instead of trying to push the oil around or filter it out of the water, the primary use of this cloth could be to stop more oil form leaking form the pipe. Simply wrap the pipe and damaged area in the cloth, and the oil won't be going anywhere, allowing for other clean-up measures to filter out the oil.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
The problem is not in separating oil from water-- gravity already does that quite well, without the intervention of some special cloth.
The problem is the dilution-- the stuff is spread over thousands of square miles.
Then theoretically, any enterprising shrimp boat captain with this filter and a floating storage tank could sop up the stuff and sell it at spot price to a competitor of BP (Insert evil grin here).
...and Bubba-Gump Oil is what they got!
Di Gao's brother in law Di Kotexa claims to have had his lab broken into and secret papers from his greatest achievement stolen.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
As has been noted by many before, coagulants would have been a better idea for cleanup, but dispersants proved to be more important to the task of making the oil slick look smaller in all those satellite photos. What's more important? Cleaning up this stuff, or reducing the PR damage to BP?
As good as this technique is, it can mostly be used at the edges, that is at beaches etc to get oil out of pools or ponds, not get oil out of the sea water. I wonder how hard would it be to use Solar energy to convert water into steam and separate it from oil. I know there is a big difference between the boiling points of oil and water.
Check out these guys
http://www.wimp.com/solutionoil/
You can mop it up with hay - all natural - tons of supply - after you collect the oil infused hay, you can just burn it for fuel
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
That is all.
Frankly, if anybody started doing it, nobody is going to give them a hard time about it.
What, is BP going to say "hey wait, that's our oil - dump that back in the ocean where you found it!?"
Unless the price is REALLY low I doubt it would pay off. This is crude oil, and it literally is pumped out of big holes in the ground normally. It will be hard for anybody skimming it off the ocean to be competitive. Indeed, they might burn more oil cruising around skimming it up. For this reason, I suspect that BP is more likely to thank anybody who tries to make a buck in this way. The $1M in lost sales is worth 1000x that in PR right now - they're probably spending that much every day trying to contain the spill.
It seems like this would be fine on a small scale, but pulling a large sheet of this stuff through moving ocean water would probably turn out to be extremely difficult. First, the tensile strength of the fabric would probably not be strong enough to withstand currents or other movement without a lot of bracing. Secondly, exposing it to a large quantity of oil would probably overwhelm the staining ability, causing the fabric to be "clogged," not only hampering the filtering properties but also increasing drag quite a bit.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/5/20/112720/800
By law, you need to go to court with your salvage claim, otherwise it's merely theft. And by law, flotsam has to be returned to the owner, with court deciding whether to, and at what rate, to award salvage.
We still need to plug the hole... and BP seem completely incapable of doing so themselves. This video on YouTube shows a pretty promising solution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDAkIU6zYkY
Was is just me, or does it appear that the water the came out was cleaner than the water be used (before mixing it with the oil)?
Would this be a valid way of cleaning up other (non-oil) polluted water supplies?
My first job that wasn't on a farm or building houses was as a Power Engineer. We had some old transformers and other devices which had large quantities of oil for lubrication, which would get dirty.
We mopped it up using bales of cotton, spread out. Then we picked it up and squeezed the oil out and ran that through a recycle/strain process.
Cotton works very well.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Was is just me, or does it appear that the water the came out was cleaner than the water be used (before mixing it with the oil)?
Would this be a valid way of cleaning up other (non-oil) polluted water supplies? :( )
(repost - wasn't logged in...
Instead of trying to push the oil around or filter it out of the water, the primary use of this cloth could be to stop more oil form leaking form the pipe. Simply wrap the pipe and damaged area in the cloth, and the oil won't be going anywhere, allowing for other clean-up measures to filter out the oil.
Wrap it how? How would you deal with the immense pressure from the oil coming out of the pipe? Best I could see them doing with this would be to create a sort of tube of this stuff to funnel the oil up to tankers.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Seems like most people are fixated on dragging a piece of cloth through the ocean. What if you use the cloth in a different way. What if on a giant boat you have a giant suspended horizontal piece of cloth, and you get a whole mess of pumps to pump water on top of the cloth...the water drains back to the ocean and the oil stays on the cloth. Occasionally you'd have to "sweep" the oil off the cloth and into some container on the boat. This provides an efficient way of getting the oil off the cloth. I guess the only problem with this method is the questionable throughput of the pumps. Any thoughts?
The very high quality of his lab equipment makes me totally believe that this is genuine.
... who gets the contract to build the ginormous coffee pot that this ginormous filter will fit into. Would you like that espresso?
There are no hydrogen molecules in water - that would be H2, hydrogen *gas*. It must bind with the hydrogen *atoms* in water.
I was flipping channels yesterday afternoon, and saw a live demo of this stuff on CNN. It was very impressive. The output water wasn't crystal-clear, but it was pretty close to it.
hydrophilic (it bonds with the hydrogen molecules in water)
*facepalm* No, it does not.
"Hydrophilic" means water-loving. There are no hydrogen molecules in water. In fact, "hydro" means water and "hydrogen" means water-former.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
What you fail to understand is that this was never about stopping the oil flow for BP. It has been about pumping the oil. Explosives could have sealed the well permanently on day one. Russia has done it a few times. Every plan BP has tried ended with Phase 3: Profit!
Boom! Take that Kevin "dances with spills" Kostner! You've been developing the wrong tech!
I think the armed forces of all sorts AND the coast guard should all be implicated in a massive soak and spill removal.
BP should foot the bill of course and they should make millions of yards of this cloth, even if reusable, as they will need to use as much of it as possible.
Obama should then pass a bill more strict on the types of backup plans allowed to build these drilling platforms.
I wonder why BP doesn't offer a bounty for the leaking oil. $500/bbl. My guess if you did that, you'd see an awful lot of creative ways to retrieve that oil.
It's been reported that there are huge oil plumes staying submerged as far as 3500 feet under the surface (in other words a large portion of the crude oil and/or oil-seawater slurry has a density roughly equal to that of the surrounding seawater and isn't all rising to the surface like pure light hydrocarbons would).
It's gonna be pretty tough to make a net that's 2/3 of a mile tall that is also strong enough to hold itself together while being dragged around completely submerged under water.
This technology seem to be a ripoff of that canadian invention: http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Process-absorption-organic-pollutants/WO1990009414.html
Check out my video on youtube of EKALOGIC. Its a substance i created that does the same. I am going to put another video on tonight with me doing this exact same thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbTglNfEMTI
Science wins again.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
This material could be used in a remote controlled underwater robot. It could have two tanks, one the intake tank, and one the storage tank. A robotic press with this cloth attached to a metal ring would basically start at one end and go to the other. So the process would be:
1. Intake water from outside (hopefully in the middle of an oil plume)
2. Press the cloth from one end to the other through the intake tank at a specified speed that would allow the cloth to do it's job without breaking it
3. Pump the oil from the oil side in the intake tank into the storage tank
4. Expel the remaining water out into the ocean.
5. Repeat
We could make thousands of these!!
Then all those oil plumes would be history.
But unfortunately making these little guys might take longer than those oil plumes will be around...
Whoa. I think you're missing the pain and suffering aspect. If the animal is going to die, whether we clean it or not, and it's going to suffer a slow, painful death (all unknown -- it would be nice to have some data on that), maybe suffocating the animal IS the best thing for it.
And leave your God references out of it. Being human means giving a shit about the suffering of others, and that does include animals. Sometimes you have to do the calculus and decide what's best.
Water and oil require different materials, methods and lubrication. Oil dictates one kind of pump, water another. Some water in the oil won't change the viscosity that much or necessarily wash away lubrication, but when the oil is only, say 1/20th the content of the water, you might find that systems which work well with water get clogged and systems which work well with oil seize.
So it's a real question. I assume the answer is "You bet -- they use them all the time", but I don't know for sure. Do you? I really do want to know.
Haven't chefs been using cheesecloth and other cloths to separate oil from other liquids for many years now?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
One wonders if it's even realistic to mass produce this stuff. If it's not, then this is pointless.
I'll bet certain senators are discussing the possiblity of setting up a series of such tubes, and then letting the Internet soak it all up!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
That's actually not a bad idea.
But how much will the cloth cost?
Practical like superconducting notebooks and James Rumsey's walking boat.
ANWR
My guess is that anyone able to collect and sell the spilled crude would get sued by BP for all of their proceeds plus damages and legal costs. BHO would no doubt ensure the justice department allowed this, seeing as how BP was such a big campaign contributor and all.
The water pressure at that depth is, and the depth makes doing something about it technically challenging.
But the oil pressure's not that immense.
It's a 21 inch pipe spewing 15,000 barrels a day. Given that an oil drum is roughly the diameter of the pipe (24 inches) by just under 3 feet long, that's 45,000 feet of pipe, or 9 miles a day, or a little more than a third of a mile an hour.
It's still a lot of oil that shouldn't be there, and it looks really impressive in the underwater video because of the way it suspends in the sea water, making it look larger, but the oil pressure's not what's getting in the way of capping things off.
All that said, I agree with you about the one-previous poster's suggestion. Wrapping what is effectively a reverse osmotic barrier around the thing is not going to stop the oil leaking out if there's a pressure differential.
-- Terry
Hay has been used as a sponge in other oil spills to soak it up, then it can be removed easier*. Hay we got, and can get more of. Perhaps not "the" total solution, but as part of all the solutions, it might help. I'll swap BP 100 big round old timey heavy bales (3/4 ton size) for say....1500 gallons refined off road diesel and 500 on-road diesel right now if they want it.... ;) They deliver the oil, and show up with the tractor trailers, I'll load them up as high as they want.... This time of year I am hay rich, the barn is slap full and I am stacking outside and still only half done with the first cut. We'll call this the new commodity trading....
*What to do with the oil soaked hay then, no idea, perhaps it can be mixed with coal in generating plants? I mean, hay burns and the soaked up oil will burn, seems like it might be valuable once it is concentrated like that. Either way, getting it out of the marshes is the main idea and goal. Speaking of that, what *are* they doing with the oil globs people pick up on the beaches, etc? Is it going to refineries, or what?
Then theoretically, any enterprising shrimp boat captain with this filter and a floating storage tank could sop up the stuff and sell it at spot price to a competitor of BP (Insert evil grin here).
Nice
The problem here is exactly government interference in the market. BP is operating on government land with a legal limit of $75 million on liability for damages from a spill.
It's peculiar what when government regulators distort markets by limiting corporate liability, Free Markets get blamed instead of the distorting regulations. It is entirely predictable - limit liability, and people take bigger risks than they would otherwise. It's like going to a casino, and every time you lose, the government forces the casino to give you back your money. Who wouldn't play that game?
Free Markets have plenty of mechanisms for dealing with externalities, the main being liability law. Reason.com has a couple of good articles on this, with links to more in depth articles.
http://reason.com/blog/2010/06/04/liability-vs-regulation
http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/03/limited-liability-oil-spills-a
Um...so is this really news? Phase separation filter paper has existed forever (http://www.whatman.com/1PSPhaseSeparators.aspx). ...now we only need one big enough to cover the ocean...oh wait. Shit!
Check out: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3050305586516558441# @17:30 Too bad he died the year after this video was made and his product never went anywhere.
Have not read every single comment I can't say for sure someone hasn't said this.
Now that it appears that huge Plumes of oil have been discovered at depths of 3000 feet and the oil in them is in small separated particles rather than clumps. There is no technology out there able to collect this oil and it is this oil that will cause far more long term damage, than the oil on the surface. This new invention lends itself to being configured into large trawler style nets and just as importantly could be outfitted to those very same large fishing trawlers. They simply could be lowered to the 3,000 foot deep levels just as deep sea fishing is done now. Except now they would be fishing for those huge plumes of oil.
Is it manufacturable at scale? How quickly can any meaningful supply of the treated material become available?
It's 2200 PSI; a big block of cement won't work ...it'll just seep out around the edges.
-- Terry
All that oil would never fit in there! It would have to be at least 3 times larger!
Pah. We don't need no fucking arguments. It's all spin
No, they BROKE the BOP while they were testing it, and then couldn't be bothered to fix it. That is why it didn't work. The blowout itself was caused by a combination of crappy concrete work (When even Halliburton says you're doing it wrong, you are really screwing things up) and removing the drilling mud before the plugs were in place (10 hour wait instead of 24-48 for concrete to set, only 1 plug poured, instead of 2-3). The dispersants are to make it harder to estimate how much oil has been spilled, so BP can claim the government's number of 5000 barrels/day when the $4200/barrel fines are calculated. That is $21 million/day in fines instead of a more likely $294 million/day. (70k bpd) BP has no interest in actually cleaning up the spilled oil for the same reason. On the other hand, it also gives them incentive to cap this thing as soon as possible. See y'all in August when the relief wells are finished.
Excuse my ignorance but...
Are hydrophilic substances necessarily oleophobic? I would think any substance that's sufficiently hydrophilic will repel nonpolar molecules.
Cheese & crackers, got all muddy, just scatter hay or straw on it!
More than 90% of the oil will be sucked-up into the forage, skim off the mess & recycle the oil!
Don't you think...? Or don't you?
some Swiss company claims they can do this big scale:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://nachrichten.ch.msn.com/schweiz/artikel.aspx%3Fcp-documentid%3D153682622&sl=de&tl=en
That idea has come a bit late (sorry, German language only).
A Swiss company appears already in discussion to provide fabric like it..
Insert
Where we have lakes of water mixed with oil as a consequence of exploiting oilsands.
Make a conveyor belt of this stuff, the end of which dips into the water in front of a barge. Turn on belt and drive through spill. (The belt would probably have little fins on it too to make little pools in the v-shaped convergence of the fabric belt and the perpendicular fin.) This thing would look like a mesh gravel lifter (mesh under the cloth to support the weight) with a cloth liner in it.
As the belt rises a good bit of the water drains out, then at the top you go over a roller into a vertical position, which is over a receiver, then around an end roller S-curve [recline the S 90 degrees to see what I mean] before returning the belt back into the water. The S curve acts as a roller-press expeller to squeegee (as opposed to wring) the bulk of the off of the belt. The bulk mostly-oil goes into the barge for sequester or even subsequent filtration and reclamation.
Actually plain Sheep's Wool fibers on a roller could probably do this without all the problems. Have you have ever seen the chocolate lifter/mixer things where there is a bowl of chocolate and a vertical belt that the chocolate rides up and then gets squeegeed off of? Use the viscosity and weight difference and the natural affinity between wool and oil. Make something that looks like a the warp of a loom, but in the shape of a belt. Move it all pretty fast. you could probalby get a 90/10 separation pretty easily, and that would be huge when you get multiple goes since you would naturally have a containment boom around such an arrangement.
In all cases, since the conveyor is always returning to the contaminated water, the separation doesn't have to be all that perfect.
Hell, use cheap acrylic "fun fur" from the fabric shop... or seagull feathers. 8-)
Or really, really and seriously, the plastic that can bundle rings are made of, combined with a roller press, would do wonders. Actually make the Lisa Simpson Omni Net out of the original materials. Try it. Get a six-pack of cheap caned bear. Put motor or vegetable oil in water. Dip the can rings in the mixture. Water doesn't like the plastic, oil loves the plastic, plastic cannot _absorb_ the oil. Make a loose weave of the same material and you have an oil sponge that can be roller-pressed to extract the oil after it has been lifted out of the water.
The natural tendency of crude and water to self-segregate is one of our greatest tools here.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press