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IEEE Looks At Kevin Costner's Oil Cleanup Machines
richardkelleher writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look at the machines developed by a company funded by Kevin Costner that are supposed to extract the oil from the Gulf waters. Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?"
Though much maligned, Waterworld did make a surprisingly decent profit in the end: $175m cost, with awful reviews and a mere $116m gross box-office in the US, but another $176m worldwide and pretty good DVD receipts as well.
So I suppose it's feasible Costner had a little left over for water-cleaning tech ;)
I liked Waterworld! Did people really hate it so much or is it just /.?
Most everybody hated it although I liked it well enough. Perhaps because it was so hyped and so patently moralizing. I thought Dennis Hopper was great. Costner can't act to save his life but he seems to be a reasonable director.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The machines seem to work well enough in tests; enough for BP to lease 32 of them right off the bat.
TFA states that the machines are capable of separating 99% of the oil out of the water under ideal conditions, which would be soon after the oil began mixing with the water. Weeks/Months of time since the spill began, though, the water and oil mix becomes a frothy mousse which is more difficult to separate.
I hope that the machines are still capable of collecting the oil from this mousse, even if at a slower pace than the more freshly mixed oil.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news.... But oil cleanup and spill prevention has existed outside the US for decades. Thing is that the US offers a "bounty" on contaminated SEAWATER, not on reclaimed oil. So this technology has been of little intrest in the country where it was born. And at the same time, because countries like Norway, Denmark, the UK and many others are so adept at drilling at sea, they ofcourse have all reasearched in spill cleanup and even prevention. For instance, it's the LAW to equip all wells with a remote controllable shutoff valve if you want to drill in the north sea. A device which could easily have prevented the BP spill, but wasn't used, because it wasn't a requirement.
Similarly, noone in their right mind would have used chemicals in the case of the BP spill, simply because collecting the oil afloat is much simpler than if you weigh it down where you can't reclaim it, and it affects the eco system much more profoundly.
That said, if the existance of these centrifuges makes the US more practical in their approach to spill clean up and prevention, I'm all for it. And if they can supplement or improove on existing technology I dont really care who funded their development. It could have been Mickey Mouse as long as the technology gets to make a difference, instead of being buried.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Apparently the Dutch offered to send ships that could recover 97% of the oil a couple of months back, but they weren't allowed due to US environmental regulations:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-oil-spill-response-team-standby-us-oil-disaster
I have done work with Allmaritim and trialed and tested their NOFI Oil Spill equipment equipment in New Zealand and this technology is neither new nor invented by Kevin Costner. It is very sophisticated equipment and has been around for a long time. Are we supposed to think that nobody has been working on oil spill tech until Kevin came on the scene and said "hey we should do something about this" we also do work with Slickbar another spill tech company http://www.allmaritim.com/ http://www.slickbar.com/ if you go to their websites you'll find their kit is being used in the gulf, the company Kevin has something to do with, make centrifuges, you've got to collect the oily water first before you can separate it. You take Kevin Costner out of the story and the story is about some kind of cool oil separating centrifuges, not Kevin rushing in to save us from the oil which, we had in the meantime, been twiddling our thumbs and staring at.
Such a great book, and such a crap movie. Its a shame.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yep, it is know as the Tragedy of the commons
Moderation is explained in the FAQ
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit
That just flat out is NOT true. I wish people would stop regurgitating that on slashdot.
Corporations can and do have other purposes and goals than just "enhancing shareholder value".
This is an excellent summation of what I'm talking about. PDF link.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The structure of the oil plumes means that you don't have to filter the entire Gulf to be effective at removing oil. (i.e., oil is not uniformly distributed in the spill region.) You do need to be smart about where you filter, and also start near the well itself, since these devices work best with oil before it gets degraded and whipped up into a sludge.
I vaguely recall that was the movie where mister fish mutant climbs aboard the bad guys ship to save the civilians and the little girl turns to the bad guy and says 'You're in trouble now.'
Fish man then proceeds to run around at very land-lubbing average joe speed and off teh heavily armed baddies that suddenly cannot hit anything with their weapons.
Problem 1: I don't know anyone that thought what that little kid said was neat or cool or funny, because it strained disbelief that an entire ship of pirates would have any logical reason to fear the gilled avenger based on what we had seen so far.
Problem 2: The ultimate fight scene is one of the worst choreographed set pieces I have seen in a big budget movie because the same things that made the pirates scary (predatory behavior, weaponry) are suddenly and inexplicably useless against the protagonist without further explanation.
Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....
1,830 years
to process that amount of water.
And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.
Your calculation is about 3 orders of magnitude too high:
(17000 square miles * 10 feet) / (100000 * 200 gallons per minute) = 3.37035066 years
But taking into account how much is far below 10 feet deep (as you mentioned), it would take quite a long time.
It was a really good paper.
Acoustic triggers are, by law, required on all offshore rigs in Norway and several other countries. Norway is, quite simply, the gold standard for sea drilling, and you have no idea what you are talking about.
Those fine engineers with their top hat, top kill and junkshot. BP engineers really had this one under control, only took them 91 days to get it to stop gushing. I am sure if the .gov wasn't running around holding BP responsible, the spill would have been stopped much more quickly. By magic or something.
An alternative technique of cleaning spill called "bioremediation" has been extensively researched by TERI in the past decade. Bioremediation involves harvesting a certain type of bacteria that feeds upon oil waste. A technique called "Oilzapper" involves four types of bacteria feeding simultaneously on four different layers of oil. More of this in an article in Times Of India.
You should have a look at Mr. Brooks. That one kinda took me by surprise. Very good film, plus it's got William Hurt, who's always good value.
First God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made Jack Thompson.
The devices that are mandatory in most of europe (funnily the home of BP being one of the exceptions, presumably because of the much more shallow waters they're drilling in there), are a little bit more than just the blowout preventer, it's a device which can be triggered in case of emergencies where the wireguided signals from the rig is unable to reach the BOP. They were, as best I can tell, developed after a problem with a platform sinking, same as what happened in the gulf.
Not being an engineer, I'm really at a loss to explain the difference between the BOP installed at BPs site and the ones that are generally being required by most other offshore oil producing countries. But from what the engineers explained to me, these remote controlled shutoff valves would have been able to stop the spill once the pipe had burst, assuming the blowout preventer ofcourse worked (which some people have questioned, since the installed "dead-mans-switch" didn't activate it).
From what I understand, it may have been that such valves were not installed because of the expense of installing them when drilling at these depths, and a furhter combination of BP not being required to use them, and also questioning of their effectiveness at these depths.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html has some of the best graphics detailing the idea of the remote controlled switch. Again, the assumption being that the BOP is actually functioning. And from what I can understand, replacing or repairing a defective BOP IS possible.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?