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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?"
Wow. I don't care if whatever Kevin Costner invested his fortune in amounted to something as hare-brained as a Brewster's Millions investment scam, he did something to try to prevent a dystopian future. Yay, Kevin! Even if the apparent goal of WaterWorld was to bankrupt Sony Pictures, you at least did something. I wonder if guilt motivated his actions at all? Oh well, all good.
Because it doesn't matter at all if it actually works, what matters is that we all felt good about it. P*sigh* The last 20 years of civilization and higher learning in a nutshell.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If you throw enough Linguini at the wall eventually something will stick.
You will never get anything to stick to the wall if you never try.
This is why freaks like RMS end up achieving something and the rest of us "sensible" people just end up as corporate drones.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
' 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?'
Well, he may not have been the only one, but it's obvious that the oil companies weren't; after all, they're only the causes of the problem!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I think you should read the article again. :)
The problem with the centrifuges is not the quality of the oil coming out. It's that they don't deal well with tarballs or dispersants. They need liquid oil so that it can be separated by spinning it.
Since you're spinning it to get the oil to rise to the top, if it doesn't flow (tarball), or doesn't separate (dispersant), the device ain't going to work. That is what the article was saying.
"he worries that much of the oil being picked up now will be too heavily degraded or contaminated
with dispersants to be easily separated."
This is why freaks like RMS end up achieving something and the rest of us "sensible" people just end up as corporate drones.
Now, for the first time in a long time, I don't feel so bad about being a corporate America reject.
I just need to find some great thing to do....
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
There's a reason nobody's invested in this technology-- the numbers are just impossible.
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.
Whatever - in Europe and other parts the oil spill collection technology is developing silently and is building on existing technology.
The problem isn't the existing tech - it's a political issue.
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.
Sure about that? The accident blew through the blowout preventer.
I remember reading about the pressures involved, they're higher than present in most guns...
I'm not sure a separate shutoff device would have functioned itself, otherwise I'd have expected them to have gotten the well shut off a lot quicker - simply drop a valve onto the remains of the header, weld it on however they need to, then shut the valve. Not spend three months designing something that wouldn't look out of place on a rocket.
I don't read AC A human right
It's called the "Unreasonable Man Paradox"
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Call me cynical, but it would never happen. Instead, oil companies would take a lesson from Hollywood, and make every single oil well its own corporation, so any disaster would be insulated to a single small corporation that goes broke.
Presumably the tarballs are solid. Can't they just use a mesh to pick them out before they go into the centrifuge?
No sig today...
Yea, dispersants were a bad idea since the ultimate plan was to get all that lost oil back. Raise your hand if you saw that one coming.
Many things, valve included, have difficulty turning when stuff blows up and cuts off power and/or communication to the controls.
There have been solutions to those problems for many years. The deep water blowout preventers required for North Sea operations have to automatically shut off unless a positive control signal is continuously applied. I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere. Equipment that will properly do the job already exists, we just need to make it unprofitable to not use it.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
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?
I'm certain the answer to that question is "No". Lot's of money has been invested. Smaller spills are quietly cleaned up. But this one was so big the politicians felt the need to get involved instead of letting the engineers who know what they're doing handle it. Of course, 'involved" mostly meant running around helplessly shouting "someone's going to pay for this".
The idealistic notion you describe in the first part is exactly how laws started out. We ended up with the situation you describe in the second part because idealistic notions rarely, if ever, work in the real world.