Mrs Floppy asked me this and I did not have an answer.
With the current crisis in the Gulf of Mexico in mind, surely a vessel exists, a floating ‘sucker-upperer’ if you will, that can sail through and around the slick separating the water form the oil, off loading the oil every now and again to a waiting tanker?
Is there such a device?
I’m more than certain there isn’t one already existing as viable amounts of oil floating on oceans is not a common occurrence to justify the cost of such a vessel. Don’t see a reason why we couldn’t build one though, oil and water tend to want to stay separate - and a reasonably concentrated mixture could be offloaded for offshore processing/purification
With large oil spills becoming more commonplace, maybe oil companies could keep such a vessel in their services.
I think the economics of such a ship would be questionable if it depended solely on the market value of the oil it sucked up. Oil slicks are spread over vast areas. To comb (say) a surface hectare (100 meters x 100 meters) of sea for a few gallons of oil contaminated with seawater for processing is not IMO a viable business plan given the invested and operational cost of the process.
I’ve seen small ones in naval ports for cleaning small local spills. Basically a boat with an open separation tank and a conveyor belt with scoops that is put into the water. The scoops pick up oil/water and dump it in the tank; water goes out the bottom and oil stays inside.
No way to scale something like that for something this size though.
Well, how about if the oil companies were required to fund some kind of communal spill cleanup fleet. If the oil can be reclaimed and sold to offset some of the cost, just a bonus. I would personally envision something more like several oceangoing barges as a home base and a team of small ships doing the scoop work, with the small ships able to tow/push the barges as needed for repositioning. Might also create good positioning for people doing research into oil spill mitigation and environmental study.
Well, we’re not doing it to capture the oil for economic gain. We’re doing it to clean the crap up. Given the frequency of what I would call major spills I would think such a vessel would be entirely practical.
Exxon alone makes about a billion dollars a month in profits. One of these ships may come in at say $50M?? Good insurance if you ask me.
I’m interested if there’s a cite that large spills are becoming more common. My understanding is that offshore drilling in particular has a pretty stellar accident record overall.
How many square miles is this spill? How thick is it?* How much would a ship be able to scoop up before a storm churns up the oil and water? If you could only hope to scoop up a fraction of a percent of the oil this way, it wouldn’t really be practical.
Yes, and they’ve been deployed en masse.
This Business Week article says that the US Coast Guard and BP have skimmed about 4500 barrels of oil so far.
Unfortunately, that’s probably only about 1% of the total oil spilled. (Based on an estimate of 25,000 barrels a day times 18 days as of May 8).
Even if they stopped the flow of oil today, the spill is covering about 9000 square miles – roughly the size of New Jersey. It would take months to suck it all up, even with all of the oil skimmers in the world.
They’re not just skimming the whole ocean, though. That’s what the miles of booms are for. The booms essentially concentrate the oil in a small enough area to make the skimming process feasible. Trying to skim thousands of square miles of ocean is a hopeless task.
They’re trying to contain more oil, ie the oil that is still coming out. But the oil has already covered about 9,000 square miles. Just look at the map from NOAA. It’s already about 400 miles wide and maybe 250 miles from north to south, and it continues to spread, and hundreds of thousand of gallons of new oil keep pouring out every day.
Maybe the skimmers can protect some local shorelines, but it’s still like fighting a forest fire with a garden hose.
Link to the NOAA map I referenced. The NY Times has a nice one that shows how the oil has spread over time.
I think they should of had a small fleet of Oil Slurping Vessels ever since the Exxon Valdiz.
Obviously the idea is not to need them in the first place.
They are not supposed to be money makers, but Environmental cleaner-uppers after a spill. Quickly retrofitted ships that would do other tasks in between disasters.
Consisting of smaller nimble skimmer boats and a couple tankers that can hold then take the oil to refineries.
But, of course no Company or Government wants to waste money on nonsense like the environment. :rolleyes:
The problem is, no one want’s to take into account, or the responsibility for the WHAT-IF’S until it happens. Everyone just points fingers and laughs all the way to the bank, then let the people figure it out for them selves, along with another TAX…as usual.
Actually, the problem with this proposal is that it appears that oil skimming boats are not a solution to the problem of oil distributed over vast ocean expanses in relatively small quantities.
Based on what I’ve read, there was actually a contingency plan in place since 1994 for dealing with exactly this problem, but the fire booms that were supposed to be prepositioned to deal with the problem weren’t there.
I’m reading differing stories about who was responsible for having the equipment in place. I suspect that someone is doing some heavy duty lying, but it is going to take a while to figure out who it is.
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/fire_boom_oil_spill_raines.html
http://wsbradio.com/localnews/2010/05/disaster-in-the-gulf.html
http://www.epa.gov/emergencies/content/lawsregs/ncpover.htm
It looks like the problem isn’t a lack of planning, but that someone failed to implement the plan. If it turns out the federal government was ultimately responsible, then we have 3 successive administrations that screwed the pooch on this one.
Now Paul Krugman is blaming it on the Dept. Of the Interior.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/opinion/10krugman.html?ref=opinion
I starting to wonder if I’m going to have to go read the regulations myself.
