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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?"
It's not that noone's ever made machines like this; many have, and the "industry leader" is a company called Prosep from Canada.
Keep in mind that using these machines, as long as they're not absolutely perfect, violates the Clean Water Act, which mandates perfection so strongly that 95% solutions are penalized. The bureaucracy sat around for a couple months basically trying to decide whether to ignore the fact that Costner's machines, while good, violate their rules, more or less, which is why these machines are (as another poster pointed out) used much more outside the US than within it.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I seem to remember that a ship sank on the set of Waterworld, and they had to pay a tonne of money to clean up the resulting debris and spills. I can see how that lesson would have been a driver for developing a technology to make it cheaper. Scratch that itch!
I worked on Waterworld, like half the people in Hollywood. What sank was that artificial island they built. I wasn't on set at the time but it was a mess and cost them months. They also shot the first two or three months without a final script so they mostly shot guys riding around on jet skis. That why there's so much footage of those. It was the most waseful shoot I was ever on.
The "real" problem with the centrifuges that Costner invested in is that they can't possibly flow enough water to put a dent in the Gulf Oil Spill. The IEEE article's calculation of the centrifuge's capacity assumes they're basically sticking a hose right on top of the oil spill, which is hardly realistic. Even assuming that the majority of the oil spilled is in the first 3 inches of water, a 1 mile by 1 mile area would need to have 50 million gallons filtered. 3 of the centrifuges could process 600,000 gallons per day, and so would take 83 days to complete a 1 mile x 1 mile x 3 inch deep volume of water. With an oil spill covering roughly 8,000 square miles, 700,000 days would be required. So under ideal conditions (all the oil was concentrated in one spot and easy to collect), it would take over 6000 centrifuges to process the "ideal spill" in one year. I think the centrifuges could be quite useful for filtering small, localized areas (protected wetlands, beaches, coves, etc), but the open ocean is just so massive that no device could effectively take care of it. In my opinion, a solution leveraging nature itself would be ideal.
They can when those tarballs are on the sand. Check out the machines from Beach-tech. These machines use mesh to 'sift', and do not 'rake'. Raking breaks up the tarballs undesirably.
An interesting factoid is these machines work much better at night in the dark, because the colder temperature coagulates the tarballs better for easier removal.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.