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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 ;)
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 ?
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.
That article is old. The dutch ships have been working in the gulf for a while now.
http://www.examiner.com/x-325-Global-Warming-Examiner~y2010m6d15-Dutch-Skimmers-now-working-in-Gulf
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
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.
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.