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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 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.
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.