Posted on 07/01/2010 7:46:11 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- A ship described as the world's largest oil skimming vessel has arrived in the Gulf of Mexico, but was awaiting approval to begin work in cleaning up the oil disaster, according to a spokesman for the Taiwanese company that owns it.
The A Whale arrived in the Gulf on Wednesday, the Coast Guard said. It was anchored in Boothville, Lousiana, about an hour south of New Orleans.
"While the ship is ready to work, it still doesn't have approval to engage in the effort," said Frank Maisano, spokesman for TMT Shipping, the vessel's owner and operator, in a statement.
Officials from the company are meeting with BP and the U.S. Coast Guard Thursday morning, he told CNN. "We don't know what will happen," he said, but added it's expected that parameters for a test of the vessel will be discussed -- "they'll give us a plot and we'll test the technology."
"The government is eager to get on board the super skimmer A Whale in the region and see if (it) is effective in skimming oil," the Coast Guard said in a statement. Currently, weather associated with Hurricane Alex -- downgraded to a tropical storm Thursday after making landfall on the Mexican coast -- has resulted in the suspension of skimming operations, the statement said, but "we will maintain close contact with the ship's owners to proceed as soon as weather allows."
A team has been formulated to assess the A Whale's ability to collect oil and other factors, as well as its ability to maneuver at slow speeds, the Coast Guard said. Alterations allowing the ship -- originally built to carry cargo -- to collect oil was completed in mid-June.
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
This is good news but when is the leak going to be plugged OBAMI?!
Residual effects from the storm, the first hurricane of the Atlantic season, could prohibit skimming and burning of oil in the Gulf at least until Saturday or Sunday, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers said. Winds were 15 to 20 mph at the cleanup site on Wednesday and producing waves 6 to 8 feet high, he said.
“When seas get over 3 feet high, the skimmers become ineffective. They wind up gathering water and not oil,” Zukunft said.
the A Whale was initially designed to be one of the largest cargo vessels afloat, and was completed at a South Korean shipyard for transporting crude oil and iron ore. However, Maisano said in the statement, when the disaster unfolded, TMT modified the vessel to become “the world’s first large-scale skimmer, which can literally swallow millions of barrels of the oil slick in the Gulf.”
Its skimming capacity is “at least 250 times” that of the modified fishing boats currently conducting skimming operations, the statement said. It can draw in as much as 500,000 barrels (21 million gallons) of oily water in an eight-to-10 hour cycle.
TMT is also attempting to complete similar vessels in order to help with the Gulf disaster, Maisano said.
Authorities on the ground are busy preparing for future storms as Alex’s threat diminishes.
Planners with the Louisiana governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness this week created a hurricane evacuation plan with BP, said the office’s director, Mark Cooper.
The plan, applicable for the entire hurricane season — which ends November 30 — calls for BP’s thousands of workers to leave the Louisiana coast at least 16 hours before officials begin evacuating residents.
Why is the A-Whale not skimming oil in the Gulf? Video at http://bit.ly/aHf2NM
Un-F'ing-Believable.
MORE DESCRIPTIONS OF THIS MONSTER TANKER HERE :
July 1 — With Hurricane Alex’s winds churning up waves in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s only one ship believed to be strong enough to keep cleaning up the oil spill there amid stormy seas: the world’s biggest oil skimmer.
The Taiwanese-flagged vessel, named “A Whale,” is 3 1/2 football fields long and looms 10 stories high. It’s outfitted with 12 vents on either side of its bow, which experts hope will be able to suck up as many as 21 million gallons of oil-tainted water each day.
The boat docked Wednesday in Louisiana, where most smaller skimmers have been forced off the water for days because of the threat of rough seas from Hurricane Alex. The Coast Guard is meeting with the big skimmer’s owners in anticipation of giving it a whirl as soon as today.
A Whale was originally built as a conventional oil tanker earlier this year in South Korea, but its owner decided to change it into an oil skimmer after the gulf spill. It motored over to Portugal for a refitting, and then made its way across the Atlantic.
“It is absolutely gigantic. It’s unbelievable,” Ed Overton, an environmental sciences professor at Louisiana State University, told The Associated Press after seeing the ship last week in Norfolk, Va.
Nobu Su, the CEO and founder of TMT Group, the Taiwanese shipping company that owns A Whale, described the boat’s technology to a gaggle of reporters and maritime executives last week in Norfolk. He said the vessel would roll across the gulf “like a lawn mower cutting the grass.”
“A large-scale disaster needs a large-scale solution,” Su said in comments carried by several news outlets.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST
The Coast Guard aux is making sure they have life jackets and the proper fire ext on board
Yeah, but Coast Guard regulations require all ships of this size operating in the Gulf to have a number of fingernail clippers on board equal to or exceeding the mean number of transit passengers on vessels of equal or smaller size that have transited the Gulf in the last ten years; unless said vessel is able to perfom S-turns within N-Class guidelines for transit vessels not requiring fingernail clippers.
Without paperwork on this, the vessel must be seized and sold for scrap.
CLICK HERE FOR VIDEOS OF THE SUPERTANKER :
http://www.kdvr.com/news/nationworld/dp-nws-oil-skimmer-20100625,0,456573.story
Huh? how much paperwork is involved in that? Governemtn health care will be like this when you are in the emergency room waiting your heart surgeon
Government is where the phrase "Hurry up and wait" was invented.
Something I’ve wondered about all these “skimmers” at work. Some are just refitted fishing boats, and some are large and built for the purpose. But a couple of questions:
1. From how deep down into the water can the most efficient skimmers pull the oil/water mixture?
2. And how much of the crude is near the surface, and how much is too far down into the water for the skimmers to reach?
I know much of the oil floats, but reports also seem to suggest that there a big globs of it pretty far below the surface.
Paging Mayor Nagin... Paging Mayor Nagin.
Your bus is ready!
. . .In a face-to-face meeting in Washington, DC, Su told me he still does not know how many millions he spent to sail the ship from near Shanghai to a Portugal shipyard, there to have its unique oil-skimming system installed, and then dispatch the ship to the U.S. He says he made the decision to act about May 1st and the ship arrived in the U.S. by June 25—a timetable that U.S. officials had considered impossible to achieve.Su believes so firmly in its potential that he already has retrofitting underway in Portugal on the B Whale, a sister ship that he says could arrive in the Gulf of Mexico by mid-July. And the C Whale not too long afterward . . .
Could bad weather get in the way? Su says the mammoth vessel can withstand what others cannot, so it would be the last ship that had to leave due to weather—and the first to return to oil removal work .. .
Su’s team generously gives credit to the USA for creating his entrepreneurial and innovative spirit that he says is part of his Taiwanese upbringing. His senior vice president, T.K. Ong, says the environment for success was created by the “moral and material support” provided by the USA to the island nation after it broke from mainland China . . . full text
I hope not, but can’t help thinking that this will be a colossal fail
BP needs to end the underwater injection of dispersants into the plume so the oil will rise to the surface and can be skimmed while still well out to sea.
The dispersants are keeping most of the oil suspended below the surface where it can’t be skimmed until it reaches the shallow shoreline area.
"Obama and the Golf Oil Spill"
They are making sure the discharge is 99.985% pure of oil. Another EPA reg getting in the way of cleanup.
Pray for America
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