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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.
...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.
You're right - because someone came up with an elegant, no-moving-parts, no-training-needed design to clean the seawater, but it doesn't clean up the marshlands, it's useless.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, the "easy" oil is there in nice, safe, relatively shallow water where leaks/spills etc would be comparatively trivial to deal with, but environmental interests have forced rigs further and further offshore in an attempt to effectively halt/limit offshore oil drilling by making it too expensive & difficult for the oil companies, while being able to claim they're not trying to stop offshore drilling, just being good stewards of the planet.
So, rather than having a shallow-water rig where any leak or blowout can be swiftly, safely, and effectively dealt with, we have the current situation. I'm sure the wildlife that has and will die, along with the fishing and tourist industries, appreciates the intentions, just maybe not the outcome so much.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Yay!!
I knew somebody would figure out a way of making this the "liberals" fault!
All hail the mighty Spin!
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
No, the "easy" oil is there in nice, safe, relatively shallow water where leaks/spills etc would be comparatively trivial to deal with, but environmental interests have forced rigs further and further offshore in an attempt to effectively halt/limit offshore oil drilling by making it too expensive & difficult for the oil companies, while being able to claim they're not trying to stop offshore drilling, just being good stewards of the planet.
And what is the source of your information? From my friends in the oil industry, all the "easy" oil is gone. And by "easy" there are a number of different factors.
Location is only factor. Extraction difficulty is another. Canada is sitting on the largest oil sands in the world at a possible of 1.7 trillion barrels. The problem is all that oil is suspended in sandy soil. The cost of separating the oil from the sands is very expensive. The other downside is extracting this oil requires destroying the land.
Another factor are impurities once you get the liquid. Sulfur makes the oil "sour" and combines with water to make sulfuric acid corroding any equipment. Processing sour crude is more expensive than sweet crude. Unfortunately, all the sweet crude is gone. And that's just one impurity.
One of my friends was working on a well that which had 30% H2S gas in the well. 30 years ago, they would have plugged that well and moved on but right now they have no choice.
So, rather than having a shallow-water rig where any leak or blowout can be swiftly, safely, and effectively dealt with, we have the current situation. I'm sure the wildlife that has and will die, along with the fishing and tourist industries, appreciates the intentions, just maybe not the outcome so much.
Please have a source for your outrage otherwise it would appear to be merely ravings.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.