| Wed Jun. 9, 2010 3:36 PM PDT
But over three hours of hearings Wednesday, Costner became the unlikely voice expressing the heart of an issue that has become very clear in the past 7 weeks. Neither oil companies nor the government were adequately prepared for a major oil spill. In fact, no one really believed that one would ever happen, and for years under-invested in and under-planned response technology.
Costner seems to have developed somewhat of an obsession with oil spill clean up. He got interested in the subject in 1995, and although he says he was inspired by the Exxon Valdez spill, some have pointed out that the interest also arose right around the time he released the post-apocalypse epic Waterworld. Since then, he's spent $24 million funding Ocean Therapy Solutions, a company that has created a centrifuge device that separates oil from water.
"I have spent all my profits on oil spill clean up," Costner told the panel. The amount of money he has personally spent becomes even more significant when you consider that an official from the Minerals Management Service told the panel yesterday that it only receives between $6 million and $7 million in government funding for the research and development of oil spill clean-up technology every year.
For more than a decade now, he's presented the contraption to oil companies and government agencies, but his enthusiasm was "met with apathy," he said. "I was told it was too expensive, that spills were becoming less frequent."
The contraption is best described as a portable, vacuum-like metal unit that spins the oil out of the water. They have five different models, the largest of which can separate 210,000 gallons of water and oil per day. The company says it leaves the water 99 percent clean. BP has run several tests on the technology since the leak began, and approved it for use last month. Since then, BP has placed an order for 32 machines, the company reports, and ten machines are already out working in the Gulf. Ocean Therapy Solutions CEO John W. Houghtaling said he believes that when all these are in use, they will be able to clean 6 million gallons of water per day. (It's not clear how much of a dent this could put in the spill, the total volume of which has not been determined. And since much of the oil has been dispersed into the Gulf using chemicals, it may be harder to do much with Costner's contraption). The company envisions hundreds of these mobile units deployed around the world, ready for the next spill wherever it may occur.
Like many, I at first thought the idea of Kevin Costner as Gulf savior sounded absurd. But unlike BP or the federal government, he's actually been thinking about this issue for the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the government's response plans have remained essentially unchanged in the two decades since our last big oil spill. The two panels of independent scientists and government officials more than made that clear on Wednesday.
Costner, at least, may finally see his work validated after all these years: "If we're going to continue to see oil coming up on shore and the best we can do is hay and rubber boots," he told the committee, "maybe we can do better."
Waterworld Meets BP Spill
| Wed Jun. 9, 2010 7:00 AM PDT
At first blush, it might seem rather strange to invite Costner to this hearing, rather than, I don't know, one of the 92,000 members of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. But Costner has invested $24 million in oil-spill technology over the last 15 years. And yes, 15 years ago was when the post-apocalypse epic Waterworld was released. The research he funded for Ocean Therapy Solutions has created a centrifuge that can separate oil from water (see a demonstration here). In fact, his solution seems a lot more credible than some of the bizarre ideas we've heard from BP in the past seven weeks, a company that clearly was not prepared to deal with this catastrophe. Costner, meanwhile, has been preparing for this for years. BP approved the device last month for use in the Gulf.
I'll be live-Tweeting from this morning's hearing, which you can follow here:
Kate Sheppard Live-Tweets the #bphearing
RT @DanielSchulman: The USG is issuing press releases containing facts/figures provided by #BP that gov hasn't even bothered to check: http://mojo.ly/9fSahR
If You Spill It, They Will Come .... Kevin Costner gets his big chance on #BP #oilspill http://bit.ly/9KPvre
Baird: "This business of we're going to make this right. You're going to disperse this problem in space and time. It's baloney." #BP
Costner says they had two successful tests with BP, they're now placing initial order for machines. #BP
Costner says he took his oil spill contraction to oil companies, gov't agencies, but "my enthusiasm was met with apathy." #BP
Costner: "There's been some question as to why I'm here. It's not because I heard a voice in a cornfield." #BP
Dr. Kinner of U of NH: "The road to funding oil spill R&D has been paved with good intentions but relatively few dollars." #BP
Joye on dispersants: "We should have known the impacts of these dispersants before they were ever used." #BP
Dr. Short of Oceana says cuts to gov't "has the effect of turning it over to industries that benefit most from resource exploitation." #BP
Pretty sure that would be categorically false. #BP
How Does Kevin Costner's Oil Cleaning Machine Work, Exactly?
By Derek Thompson
Sounds great! How does it work?
The company, Oil Therapy Solutions, explains the mechanics of the machine on its website. If you want to read the description verbatim, it's at the end of the article.* Greg Lowry, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, helped me translate the jargon into simpler English.
"It's basically a centrifuge," Lowry says, a machine that spins rapidly to separate fluids using centrifugal (well, technically centripetal) force. Think about a washing machine in spin cycle. If you open it up, you'll see the wet clothes flung against the side of the washer. That's the same force Costner's machine employs. It spins the oily water, flinging the denser liquid, water, away from the lighter liquid, oil (which you know is lighter since you've seen the picture of it floating on top of the Gulf). It's the same technology beer companies use to spin the solid yeast particles of out their brew.
Oil-water separation devices exist, Lowry says, but many of them use holding ponds to drain the liquids. The centrifuge is the new part of this solution, but from what he can tell, "it's not exotic at all."
One challenge for the centrifuge in the Gulf is that the chemicals BP used to disperse the oil under water might complicate the cleaning."Think about it," Lowry says. "You're operating on phase [liquid] separation. You want one phase to move in one direction and the other phase in another. If small droplets are stuck in the water they might move with the water. So those tiny droplets could hurt the efficiency of this process."
In his testimony in front of the House Energy and Environment subcommittee, Costner requested Congress to mandate the purchase of these oil vacuums for every oil company as "insurance" against the likelihood they might spill crude into the sea -- kind of like a life vest for oil clean-ups. Now that BP has employed at least ten of his most powerful centrifuges, we'll see if Costner's investment pays off.
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OTS describes the oil vacuum: "Two mixed liquid phases, such as water and oil, are drawn into the annulus between the contacter body and the rotar. Liquids gravitate downward in the annulus where rotational liquid motion is slowed by radial vanes in the bottom plate. After entering a hole at the base of the rotar, the liquid phases are then centrifugally separated into a duel vortex because of the density difference between the two fluids. In the case of water and oil, because of the density difference, heavier water exits the rotar from a hole at the top of the unit, while the lighter oil is recovered near the central shaft."
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