Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
That is all.
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.
Deepwater Horizon drilled a hole under 5000 feet of water. The depth of the drill hole through bedrock is 30,000 feet. While the bole hole is a feat, the trouble capping the well is more related to the depth of the water above the well not the depth of the well itself.
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...
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.
Wow... simply wow... Ixtoc 1 would beg to differ. That was in 160 feet of water and it took them 9 months to cap it. I know you wanna blame the liberal environmentalists but that is simply not the reason oil is being moved offshore. You ever wonder why the current rig we are dealing with is licensed in a foreign country? The Marshal Islands is home-base for the revenue which is conveniently not taxed.
Given that Ixtoc 1 happened 30 years ago and they are using the same exact techniques to deal with it I have zero faith that it would have been resolved by now if this spill were in 500 feet or less of water.
It's amazing the depths of rationalization going on in BPs favor. They have a history of bad behavior and somehow you come to the conclusion that it's the environmentalists forcing them to take risks? Just four years ago BP was shown to be negligent in many of the same ways. It appears little has changed from what should have been a dramatic wake-up call. Regulations for offshore drilling exist for a reason and it's not to make drilling near shore expensive.
This technology seem to be a ripoff of that canadian invention: http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Process-absorption-organic-pollutants/WO1990009414.html
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
[citation needed...]
This ought to be good...
I'm craving Primanti Brothers right now.
Whether or not they know it, everyone does. Always.
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.
Now how about we figure out a way to clean up the marshes that got fucked with an oil-slicked spiked baseball bat?
aquadam.net
I work for them, we're trying everything to get noticed, but it seems like the responses we get (less than 10%) are "Talk to BP". I don't know what kind of deal they've got going, but if they don't do something quick, all the wetlands in that area will be fucked.
Blah blah, anything I say does not represent my employer blah blah
but seriously, I love nature and hate what is happening here.
Wrong. They would be drilling in both.
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.
It's people like you that lead to lakes dying or even catching on fire. Just because we need a commodity doesn't mean the provider gets to bend us over a barrel and rape our environment. If oil companies didn't show such blatant disregard for the environment I would actually support drilling for oil in ANWR as I think it would stabilize a lot of political pressure in the middle east.
I don't agree with the method AC used to reply I understand where that frustration comes from since no one seems to be doing anything to control the oil industry out of fear of reprisal. With corporate entities wielding such level of control something really does need to change like a nationalized drilling of ANWR. I don't really like that idea but it does seem better than giving the contract to BP who has twice shown what can be viewed as criminal negligence in four years or Shell who spills the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez oil spill every year. There aren't a lot of good options but I wouldn't rule out one of the much smaller oil companies that have a better track record.