http://foreign.peacefmonline.com/business/201006/52204.php
Kevin Costner’s brother has spent a lot of time developing a centrifuge machine to clean oil out of water. BP bought 32 of them. But, does anybody know if they really work? He tried to sell them to a couple other countries and they rejected them. I know BP can say they were trying if they ponied up for them. Can anybody get past the hype and tell us they really do the job?
They work but it is less then a drop in the bucket. BP would need hundreds of thousands of those things. They just bought them to get Kevin to shut up and to look good for the news agencies
I dunno, the article says it filters 128,000 barrels of water a day.
Wikipedia cites a report that says most of the oil is within 30cm of the surface and is 15,000 square kilometers (I just pulled the midrange of the area estimates of the oil slick). Someone should check my math, but I get that one device should be able to filter one three-hundred thousandths of the spill a day. Of course, the math probably gets worse as the spill progresses, but even if the spill stops today, that seems pretty small. I suspect just burning the stuff is more efficent.
Seems like a PR move to me.
And that’s technology thats had 20 million dollars and several decades of work put into it, which makes me pretty skeptical of all the other people claiming that there mothers brother has an awesome idea to filter out the oil and why oh why won’t the gov’t/BP listen.
Yeah, it works but not nearly in the quantities required. Still, it doesn’t hurt anything either, and it’s not like there’s a better plan being taken instead yet.
It seems to me they could do some good if deployed in a targeted manner. Obviously they won’t clean up even a small fraction of the oil, but they might be able to prevent some of it from coming ashore.
It’s a centrifugal oil/water separator. They work, but for low volume applications. They’ve been around for decades and weren’t invented by Costner.
I agree that it’s just a PR move by BP.
As to how it works, picture a 6" diameter pipe that’s 2’ long, standing on end. The pipe is spinning very fast. You pump the oil/water mix into the bottom of the pipe and it comes out the top.
As the mix goes up the pipe, it starts to spin along with the pipe. The water is heavier than the oil, so it’s flung out to the inner pipe wall. What you have coming out at the top is a ring of water flowing along the pipe wall, and a ring of oil in the middle of the pipe.
Say the water ring is 2" thick and the oil ring is 1" thick, based on the mixture you put in. You then stick a 2" diameter stationary pipe into the top center of the spinning pipe. The stationary pipe wall is right at the oil/water ring interface, so the oil goes inside the inner pipe and the water comes out between the two pipes.
4 million barrels a day is a substantial amount of oil to process. Had this been deployed in a contained area early in the event it would have been much more effective. The idea is to contain the oil and then vacuum it up, not run around the entire planet looking for little tar balls floating around.
For anyone who can’t visualize it, I came across an LA Times blog entry a couple weeks ago that has an instructive illustration.
They have to work better than shop vacs, which is what the president of Plaquemines Parish bought to clean up the marshes:
If it was a PR move (and it mainly was), it’s probably the first reasonably competent PR move BP has made since the spill started.