Grooved Disk Spinner Cleans Up: $1M For Winner of Oil Recovery Challenge

cylonlover writes "Last July, in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the X PRIZE Foundation launched the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE. As with previous X PRIZE competitions, this one was intended to encourage private sector scientific research, by offering a cash prize to whichever team could best meet a given challenge. In this case, teams had to demonstrate a system of their own making, that could recover oil from a sea water surface at the highest Oil Recovery Rate (ORR) above 2,500 US gallons (9,463.5 liters) per minute, with an Oil Recovery Efficiency (ORE) of greater than 70 percent. Today, the winning teams were announced with the US$1 million first prize going to Team Elastec/American Marine for their unique grooved disc skimmer."

Comments

A good start

[Maquis196]

I'm all for oil recovery from spills I really am. However I do wonder if recovery is the most efficient way of cleaning up a spill compared to breaking down the oil?

Anyone with knowledge able to confirm if recovery is the best course for cleanup?

Re:A good start

[Neil Boekend]

Can't sell the oil if it's broken down.

Re:A good start

[realityimpaired]

As a general rule, I'd say that cleaning up at least part of the spilled oil before breaking it up would always be better. I say that as an environmentalist, not as a scientist (my studies were in a different field), but I would think that leaving less released toxins in the environment would usually be the better choice. :)

They aren't talking about this replacing breaking down the oil, they're talking about it as a way to reduce the amount of oil that needs to be broken down, as well as the amount of chemicals that need to be released in order to break it down.

I'd also say that this invention is worth a hell of a lot more than $1m to the industry.

Re:A good start

[MozeeToby]

The problem with breaking it down is going to be that any efficient process to do so is going to de-oxygenate the water. In fact, most of the oil is would be naturally broken down by bacteria in relatively short order (leaving behind some of the heavier byproducts unfortunately) but the dead spot it creates can take a very long time to recover.

Re:A good start

[TubeSteak]

Have you ever been to a beach that's had an oil spill offshore?
After any decent sized storm, balls of tar end up on the beach.

http://www.pnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011111010008

"BP is taking its heavy equipment back to Pensacola Beach today to remove a concentration of tar patties buried in the sand near Portofino Resort."

That was 3 days ago and once you start finding tar balls/patties/sheets, they show up more or less forever.
Why? Because the majority of oil does not get broken down, it sinks and waits to blow up on your shoreline.

Re:A good start

[Solandri]

As a general rule, I'd say that cleaning up at least part of the spilled oil before breaking it up would always be better. I say that as an environmentalist, not as a scientist (my studies were in a different field), but I would think that leaving less released toxins in the environment would usually be the better choice. :)

The problem with that rule is that the toxicity is proportional to concentration. The ocean ecosystem has the ability to naturally break down crude oil. Natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico are estimated to release about as much oil as the BP spill every year. It's just that the seeps are scattered and have a much lower flowrate, so the oil is much less concentrated, and the ecosystem is much better able to cope with it. That was the point of using dispersants (aka soap, for all you folks who are upset about releasing "chemicals" into the ocean): To prevent the oil from building up on the 2-dimensional surface and especially the 1-dimensional shorelines, and distributing it more evenly within the 3-dimensional ocean where it has a much lower concentration. That's the reason oil is still found along parts of the shoreline in Alaska more than 2 decades after the Vadez spill - once it reaches the 1-dimensional shoreline, it's highly concentrated (very small surface area per volume of oil), meaning it takes decades for bacteria to break it down naturally.

In other words, the impact of an oil spill and the duration of contamination is greatly multiplied by oil's tendency to float on the surface, and multiplied even more by its tendency to build up on shorelines. If you can cause it to remain mixed in the water, the overall impact of the spill isn't much greater than that from natural seeps. Of course there's a stronger local impact (anoxic plumes underwater as bacteria break down the oil), but these decisions have to be made by comparing the possible solutions to each other, not by comparing a solution to the pristine state if there were no spill.

So a decision about dispersing vs. collecting has to be made taking into account both the efficacy of collection and the exaggerated impact of allowing oil to reach the surface and shorelines. If dispersing can cause 90% of the oil to be consumed by bacteria within a year with none left after 5 years; then it is a superior solution to collecting 50% of it from the surface, 20% evaporating, while the remaining 30% coats the shorelines with 20% remaining after a year, and 5% left after 10 years. (Numbers made up for illustration. I have no idea what the actual rates are.)

Website

[JumboMessiah]

Very little mention of the actual product. Here's the image gallery for, what I assume, are the skimmer.

Re:Website

[DiabolicallyRandom]

While the linked website does contain pictures, the gallery(s) linked are for their prior existing technology, not this new DISC skimmer The new stuff can be found here: http://www.elastec.com/xprize/index.php

Kevin Costner?

[Grizzley9]

What ever came of those oil cleaners that Kevin Costner's company supposedly had. I saw articles and remember about BP buying a few and using them but nothing after that. Were they effective? Better than the article winner? Just a PR move for BP? It says BP wanted about 32 and even had some set sail in July 2010 but after that all I see is a Slashdot article discussing it http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/18/2035238/ieee-looks-at-kevin-costners-oil-cleanup-machines

The only thing I could find close to a follow up in the popular press was from this July reviewing how well it worked and some of the failures (clogging with "peanut butter type" oil and such) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/12/bp-kevin-costner-deepwater-horizon-spill

Re:

[taiwanjohn]

There's an illustration in TFA (it's the blue thing, next to the boat). You could also follow the link in TFA to the manufacturer's website, where there's a page devoted to this technology. There are photo and video galleries linked from there.

US regulations prevent this from being used

[Anonymous Coward]

US regulations require that any water dumped back into Sea is almost completely clean (10 parts of oil per million)
EU regulation requires oil cleaners to output water that is cleaner than they took in and must be atleast 90 water.
As a result the EU emergency response fleet (that is on standby at all times and was easily capable of containing the horizon spil) was not allowed to assist.

The problem with the horizon was one of defective government not technology. No X prize is going to improve that

Re:US regulations prevent this from being used

[FrootLoops]

Citations please?

US and EU regulations are somewhat close to what you said. The US regs actually vary their PPM requirement with the water's salinity, though the average is about 10 ppm, which is extremely low. Japan's requirements are (approximately) 100ppm, for instance. The EU regs do only require 90% non-oil (so sand, water, chlorofluorohexane, what-have-you), however the EU "emergency response fleet" is only half a dozen ships and would barely have made a dent in this particular spill.

Note: the preceding paragraph was completely made up.

Re:US regulations prevent this from being used

[necro81]

The problem with the horizon was one of defective government not technology. No X prize is going to improve that

I'd say that, in the process of damning the government, you have glossed over a couple of points:

1. * BP and Halliburton, between their greed, speed, hubris, laziness, and incompetence, drilled a dangerous and defective well
2. * The US oil industry's ability to properly assess risk and prepare for and react to disaster is practically zero. [and yet were the US to, say, mandate a ready fleet of cleanup vessels, as the EU does, the same ones carping about the government response would also carp on about overbearing government regulation]
3. * Despite the world being thrown at it from both government and industry, the Macondo well spewed for months
4. * Even if the EU cleanup teams were allowed to assist, there was still 5 million barrels of crude released, which dispersed over tens of thousands of square kilometers.

So, yes, overly tight regulations may have made perfect the enemy of good, but those were not the proximate cause of the disaster.

Target ORR

[afidel]

Isn't the target ORR for the competition too low? I thought one of the biggest hurdles encountered during the cleanup was that the it was illegal for the ships to discharge partially treated water even if they had removed a significant percentage of the oil and so the only legal solution was to tanker the partially treated water and take it to a land based facility which could more thoroughly separate it. Personally I think the EPA (or whatever the responsible enforcement authority was) should have temporarily suspended the rules but that makes too much sense for the government.

Re:

[DiabolicallyRandom]

Wrong - while the linked website does contain pictures, the gallery(s) linked are for their prior existing technology, not this new DISC skimmer (you linked to the drum skimmers of old) The new stuff can be found here: http://www.elastec.com/xprize/index.php

Video of the disk spinner in action

[elmartinos]

Wadsworth's constant applies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEoDGzBcxoI

Re:Video of the disk spinner in action

[Donat]

If Wadsworth's constant applies, you can use it in the URL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEoDGzBcxoI&wadsworth=1