Slashdot Mirror
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?"
He's got webbed feet.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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 ;)
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.
This is just a sad point in our world as far as leadership and the quest for the almighty (falling) dollar is concerned. Corruption, apathetic business maneuvers, greed and the "things-are-going-good" mentality caused this whole oil spill to happen. FTFA, I think it's funny how the only plug against this whole centrifuge technology to clean up oil is based on what the end-quality of "oil" will come out of them? How about the end- quality of our oceans, sea life, beaches and aquatic mammals? We all know how oil cleanups work: if it looks good on the surface, time to move on. I hate to don my hippy hate today, but I'm ashamed to associated to humans sometimes.
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 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."
Well why should they? They only have to look after the interest of the shareholders and thats maximising Profit Baby!*
* may not be true but thats how it seems to be in practice.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit. That's how it works. They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money. I wouldn't really expect a corporation to invest money into something like developing technology to clean up oil spills unless it could demonstrate that the technology would somehow earn the shareholders money.
You could make the argument that if BP (or Exxon or whoever) developed the technology they'd be able to sell it to others... Or minimize the fines/cleanup that they have to pay for... But, the way things actually work in the real world, there's little point in that. Business as usual makes more than enough money.
Which is why, much as some people hate to admit it, some kind of government involvement is necessary.
You can regulate the oil companies - force them to invest some amount of their profits into cleanup R&D.
Or you can fund your own R&D project to develop the technology.
But, as we've seen, The Market isn't interested in this stuff.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
We just need to tweak the rules of the game a little. A fair price has to be put on this kind of thing, so that oil companies will go broke if they screw up -- then we have to let them go broke instead of declaring them "too big to fail." Also, in this case, there appears to be a culture of negligence, and those responsible for the bad choices they made should be personally held accountable. Unfortunately, this last bit simply enriches lawyers, and I'm not sure what to do about that part. I guess writing really clear laws that have no doubt as to their intent and then letting human beings sort out the nuances rather than trying to describe everything in the law perfectly would probably help.
Currently hooked on AMP
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.
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
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
Yup. A business model that's only profitable when there's a disaster (natural or man-made) isn't going to have a predictable source of income. That is, unless the company making the disaster-solution product is also put into a position where it can create disasters-- in which case, you don't actually want that.
So you have something which may be necessary but in which the "free market" will probably never invest. And after all, no one company really has enough of an interest in the Gulf of Mexico to pay for it to be cleaned up. BP didn't even have enough of an interest in the Gulf to prevent the spill from happening in the first place.
Nonsense, he was hoping to head off the bad guys in Waterworld before they got started!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterworld#Smokers
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.
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.
Such a great book, and such a crap movie. Its a shame.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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'll bet that he wasn't the only one. A better question would be: would the same small company with the same clean-up technology garner as much congress attention and free press if it had not been headed and funded by a celebrity in the first place.
Personally, I doubt it. As a society, we're still obsessed by celebrities. Companies or non-profits backed by celebrities often have a huge media advantage over competitors that have no celebrity-backing.
Yep, it is know as the Tragedy of the commons
Thats easy to fix though. Just rm -r *.tar
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)
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
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 maximization of profits is a requirement of law and a desire of the shareholders.
I'll believe the latter - I'll need a reference for the former.
I'll float a completely uninformed opinion... I think that the "legal requirement" for corporations to "to maximize profits and nothing else, within the limits of the law," is a bit of revisionist history designed to make sociopathic behavior expected and acceptable. I can accept that I may be wrong on this, but I do know that this type of language is something that seems to have come into normal usage only in the last 10-20 years, and I have a longer memory than that. Prior to that, "corporations were in business to make money," was commonly understood, but this concept that if they do anything else they're shirking their "responsibility" is new. Maybe it's really that stockholders have gotten more sociopathic. But I would have sworn that stockholder lawsuits were born in corporate mismanagement, not in failing to be sociopathic profiteers.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson
Kevin Costner also reached that level of actorness
Oh no you dih-unt.
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.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit. That's how it works. They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money
The Economist had an article on this. Maximizing shareholder value as a company goal is, interestingly enough, a recent phenomenon, from the 1970s.
The other two company goals that were apparently sidelined for maximizing profit were maximizing value for stakeholders (typically labor) or maximizing customer satisfaction.
We might be going back in the direction of the latter two.
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
There is no requirement that a corporation make money, or that if it does that the shareholders get paid any of the profits. There is no requirement that the board of directors be composed of shareholders at all, let alone those with large percentages of the voting shares.
The board of directors and the officers have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. This means that they must use the investment money responsibly, and should actually be trying to earn money for the company and the shareholders. The laws are basically there to prevent someone from starting a company, getting investment money, and then "losing" all of it due to poor decision making (paying themselves all of the investment money as a salary, for example).
Even if there were a requirement to maximize profits, that is a vague phrase. Maximize over what time scale? A financial quarter? A year, a decade, a century ...? You can't spend any money on research if you're maximizing for the quarter, but it sure helps in the 10-100 year time frame. Spending money on clean-up technology is a bit like paying for insurance. Neither is a good investment until something bad happens.
Of course none of this prevents shareholders from suing officers and directors, but that's not because they actually have a good reason to.
- The Sigless Wonder
Movie theaters make a pittance of a percentage of ticket sales the first week of a movie's run and, if there are subsequent weeks, it goes up a little each week, but that movie is going to have to run in that theater for a long, long time before the theater sees anything near 50% of ticket sales.
Movie theaters are really popcorn stores, and the movie is a loss leader to get you in the door.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
They already have to a large extent. The government didn't buy it, but if you check out the list of corporate names involved with Deepwater Horizon, you'll see a lot of corporations which are basically just fronts for BP.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
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.
Wow. That would make it the only movie in Hollywood history to show a profit.
That Costner is a genius!
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.
The whole thing is being treated as a PR exercise rather than a cleanup so this sort of thing is to be expected.
Cleanup ships were available, booms were available, the problem should have been attacked with logistics and engineering. Instead we mostly got a lot of bickering over how many barrels a day were leaking out (was 2000, then 5000, now 50000...and still rising) and doing everything possible to stop people making estimates by banning photography and dumping as many dispersants as possible into the mix before it could surface. CYA at its finest.
Dispersants don't make the oil disappear and are quite toxic in themselves so none of that solved anything, it just delayed it. We'll mostl likely be reading stories about new globs of pollution appearing in the gulf for decades to come.
No sig today...
Typically you guard against this by instituting a capitalization requirement, ensuring that companies involved in drilling have the money and/or the insurance necessary to pay likely claims in case of an accident. This is, in fact, practiced in the oil industry. As far as BP is concerned, it passes this test with flying colors. It has been and will be substantially hurt by the spill (its stock price has lost half its value and it's had to suspend dividend payments -- that's an indication of the magnitude, although I think the market has overreacted, I don't think BP's lost nearly half its value over this incident).
I doubt it. If recent events in the business world have proven anything it's that modern companies exist to maximise the remuneration of management. Shareholders, stakeholders, customers and the existence of the company itself all come in second to making sure the executive officers get vast salaries, bonuses and exit packages.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
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.
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 ?
I've no idea why this is moderated "Funny". It's what I perceive too -- directors run companies for their own benefit, all other considerations appear to be secondary.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit.
So, if a company was able to maximise profits by boiling live babies, you'd be in favour of that? You monster.
Babies are tasty.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
That is it! Throw Linguini at the oil spill! You, my friend, are a frikkin' genius!