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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.
If it's fixed, we won't be able to get rich quick turning tarballs into, basically, gold!
How do you clean and reuse your cloth? This guy: just pour the oil off the cloth and repeat. Yours only allows for a small amount to be collected before some kind of complicated rinse has to be done.
You could potentially use big trawling nets of this stuff to sieve the oil out of the gulf, just like fishermen use trawling nets to sieve fish out of the water. Scoop up a big bucket of oil+water, wait for the water to drain out, then pour the oil into a reservoir on the boat. Repeat.
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It's probably the difference between having a mop (your proposal) and a strainer (his creation). Depending on a variety of factors either one might be preferable for cleanup.
With this (assuming it works at scale) you can "push" the oil to where you want it to go, meaning that if they deployed large ones on the surface they could gradually "herd" all the oil into one place to be siphoned off... or rather, they could, if BP hadn't injected all those dispersants making it end up god-knows-where.
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Here is an example of those booms;
http://www.absorbentsonline.com/oil-absorbent-boom-oil-containment-boom.htm
Tisha Hayes
You have it backwards. Booms and diapers absorb the oil, this cloth does not absorb oil. It does the opposite, allowing water to pass through while the oil pools on top or in front.
In other words, booms and diapers act like sponges, while this cloth acts like a filter.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Maybe something more along the lines of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W8_GpMz9nI
Those life forms will be considered crude oil eventually. This just speeds up the classification process.
Nullius in verba
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).
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Prepped and ready for deep frying?
Here's a very unpleasant answer:
Shrimp, fish, squid, etc -- If they were in the oily water, they were dead anyway. They "breath" by pulling that water through gills or similar arrangements. Such surfaces will be clogged with oil and the animals will die.
Mammals and birds have a better chance, and it seems like a skimmer like this gets them into the boat and gives rescuers a chance to wash them. They're probably better off in the boat than out of it.
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.
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.
Wrong. They would be drilling in both.
I am speaking as the son of a commercial fisherman who still typically takes some vacation time from the office life to work the black cod fishery here in Alaska, and as a person who has gone through the SERV's training to get my HAZWOPER Tier 1 certification (basically, taught how to do crude recovery on open water and near-shore operations). I have spent time both in the class and on the water drilling emergency response up here.
... these were the lucky ones. Not to say that saving 10% of the recovered birds (at a very high individual cost) is a bad thing, mind you.
... surface trawling with this would only make it that much worse. That said, it would be a great way to do animal body recovery, getting the toxin-laden animals out of the food system and away from the scavengers that would eat their remains.
One of the things discussed during our breaks was that the survival rate of rescued birds and mammals was somewhere around 10% during the Exxon disaster. That does not include all of the wildlife that was missed
Perhaps the best quote of the day on this topic basically boiled down to "pictures of people scrubbing ducks is just good PR."
The whole process of what you described as "skimming" (which is very different in the recovery lingo - means using a floating pump system to recover oil, not dragging stuff through the water) would likely kill all animals that were captured. Critters would be submerged within a cloth net of oil and gunk. Regular trawling is damaging enough to them