Shelved Oil Spill Cleanup Invention Could Have Helped In Gulf

The Epoch Times ^ | May 28, 2010 | James Ottar Grundvig

[CutePuppy]

The U.S. Coast Guard has complained that there is not enough plastic tubing in the United States to construct the booms needed to contain the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. And neither BP, the Coast Guard, nor any other part of the U.S. government seems to understand how to effectively clean up the fouled Gulf.

A technology that could effectively and actively remove oil from the surface of the ocean in all weather conditions would be a huge advance for the efforts going on in the Gulf right now. In fact, such a technology was designed and tested in the 1970s in Norway. Unfortunately, this promising technology was abandoned by the 1990s.

A solid decade into drilling for oil in the North Sea, the Norwegian government grew concerned about the potential for a blowout and the damage the ensuing oil spill would do to the environment. So they directed engineers at Thune-Eureka Marine Division (the company has since morphed through many permutations to Aker-Kvaerner Engineering, and today Aker A/S) to design and build a machine that could scoop up oil in the event of a catastrophic failure of an oilrig.

That was in 1976, or one full year ahead of Norway’s first blowout in the Ekofisk Bravo Platform, which on April 22, 1977, gushed 28,000 barrels per day until the underwater gusher was capped one week later. With heavy seas breaking up the spill, an environmental disaster was avoided.

With typical Norwegian pragmatism and great foresight an engineer and inventor named Jan Sverre Christensen created the Euroskimmer. The device had to be built to handle a wide range of oil viscosities and rough seas and do so actively in the spill itself.

No other device does what the Euroskimmer was designed to do. Attention has recently been paid to the actor Kevin Costner, Costner's scientist brother, and their Costner Industries centrifuge. But this centrifuge is nothing more than a separator pump that passively sits on a barge and waits for the oil spill to come to it, with an unproven ability to gather and separate oil viscosities of any consistency, from a thin film to a “chocolate mousse.”

The system of booms employed by the Coast Guard is also passive, is only effective in calm water, and the skimming process used does a poor job of separating oil from water.

The design of the Euroskimmer was as dynamic as it was simple. It was a catamaran hull, covering six square meters of area, which gave it dependable buoyancy; no added wave motion sensors or controls had to be integrated. It had a hydraulic power pack and was operated manually by radio or a joystick. And it carried 100 meters (approximately 328 feet) of a discharge hose. But the true secret and success of the device was the “disc-adhesion” system that collected the floating oil like flypaper, the discs then spun like a wool on a spindle-whorl, thus separating oil from the seawater, and the collected materials were then discharged back through the hose to a base ship that stored the oil.

The fate of the Euroskimmer provides a cautionary tale. The 1976 Ekofisk disaster proved to be the exception, as oil spills from oil platforms proved to [be] very rare. Without such disasters, support for further development of the Euroskimmer dried up and the device is now not available to help with the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

The following is an interview with Euroskimmer engineer, Jan Sverre “Chris” Christensen.

ET: How did your idea come about?

CHRISTENSEN: Already before the Ekofisk blowout, Thune-Eureka was asked to develop a skimmer able to work in 3 meter [9.6 feet] waves, with high capacity on oil/water emulsions and “chocolate mousse” floating on sea surface. This Eureka Oil Skimmer, Euroskimmer, was nearly ready to be used on the 1977 Ekofisk blowout. However, it was tested one year later on Amoco Cadiz oil spill off the coast of Bretagne, France.

At that time, we thought there would statistically be one blowout or large oil spill every five years in the North Sea. Later we have learned that without a blowout or other type of oil spill, the activity and focus goes down to nothing. The same was with investments in new equipment, repair and maintenance of existing gear. Today, these large skimmers are on the scrap yard.

..... (excerpt) .....

[CutePuppy]

Read the rest of interview at An interview with "Euroskimmer" engineer Jan Sverre Christensen - The Epoch Times, 2010 May 28

[CutePuppy]

Follow-up article: Gulf Oil Spill Cleanup Hampered by Lack of Preparation (Norwegian Euroskimmer capable but out of production) - The Epoch Times, 2010 June 03/06, by James Ottar Grundvig

..... One area has seen the billions of dollars made by the supmajors invested in new technology to drill deeper and extract oil in harder to reach places, but not in mitigating the risk of a potential catastrophic failure. Hundreds of millions of dollars more have gone toward upgrading old technology: GPS, geology mapping software, sensors, wireless connectivity. Nothing, however, was spent to improve the “tools” used to cleanup oil spills, which were used in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico in 1979.

The tools that were used three decades ago — dispersants, Coast Guard cutter-towed booms, and centrifuge pumps — have barely evolved since with almost no new tools added to the process. That is an amazing fact, especially when Norway had developed an efficient and eco-friendly oil recovery system in the Euroskimmer by the late 1970s. But the Euroskimmer with its catamaran hull and “disc-adhesion” oil collecting device was abandoned some years later due to a lack of use. So after six weeks of failing to contain the oil spill, let alone clean it up, neither BP nor the U.S. government had any plan in place to cleanup a major oil spill. .....

I think that with new technologies, the cleanup of this mess will take much less time and cause far less sustained ecological (but probably not economical, due to its location close to wider and more populated coastline) damage than the equivalent of Exxon-Valdez. Engineers of BP and other companies will do most of the work, but Obama and Democrats will take the credit for successes and "kicking ass".

[Sacajaweau]

Any kind of boom would help. I watched the loggers on their booms in Canada...Very cool...

[norraad]

Plus, each time you go ahead and deploy in such situations the process gets improved naturally.

Which brings to light the overriding reason to delay, bringing so much catch into the refinery system already operating at a specific price point would create havoc.

I mean really, who wants dollar a gallon gasoline?

[Redleg Duke]

I wrote last week that the engineers are going to be making massive advances as a result of this incident...just like we always make massive advances due to crisies, such as war.

Obama is a small man, with small ideas and an even smaller imagination. He will be a speed bump or stumbling block, but society will give him his 15 minutes of fame or notoriety and then move on to make the great steps forward from the lessons learned.

[Liberty Valance]

" If You're Not A Part Of The Solution, There's Good Money To Be Made In Prolonging The Problem."

[airborne]

They could have burned it off.

But there’s no money to be made from that.

Now the guys who invested in dispersants sure are sitting pretty!

---

NALCO is associated with UChicago Argonne program. UChicago Argonne received $164 million dollars in stimulus funds this past year. UChicago Argonne just added two new executives to their roster. One from NALCO. The other from the Ill. Dept of Education.

If you dig a little deeper you will find NALCO is also associated with Warren Buffett, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, Soros, Apollo, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hathaway Berkshire.

http://www.examiner.com/x-37620-Conservative-Examiner~y2010m6d2-Investigation-reveals-possible-criminal-activity-connecting-Obama-to-BP-oil-spill

Goldman-Sachs, Blackstone, and Apollo are all involved in NALCO.

Arab-Americans’ investments in companies that were aligned closely with key Chicago and Illinois politicians (including former Governor Rod Blagojevich).

Arab-American businessman, Ali Atta, had ties to Nalco.

[DuncanWaring]

Ping.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

As I understand OPA-90, all petroleum handling activities in US or Federal waters must have spill response equipment nearby and every operation must hold spill drills once a year.
Why was this not in place in the Gulf ?

[HighlyOpinionated]

The idea is not to correct the situation until it destroys the States surrounding the Gulf. Problem with this is that if the blowout oil ends up in the Atlantic, it’s going to bankrupt the North East and the Elitist Base of the Demoncrats.

Once the Unions have to be shut down because the water is befouled, they’re not going to be very happy with their president.

[CutePuppy]

I wrote last week that the engineers are going to be making massive advances as a result of this incident...just like we always make massive advances due to crisies, such as war.

Hear, hear!

Obama is a small man, with small ideas and an even smaller imagination. He will be a speed bump or stumbling block, but society will give him his 15 minutes of fame or notoriety and then move on to make the great steps forward from the lessons learned.

"People with great minds talk about ideas. People with average minds talk about events. People with small minds talk about other people"

Unfortunately, the damage he is causing and is likely still to cause will get him more than "15 minutes" of notoriety (and deservedly so, if we want people to learn from history and by negative example) but I agree that as a society we will "move on to make the great steps forward from the lessons learned", both political and engineering / technological / scientific.

Amen.

[Sen Jack S. Fogbound]

Very interesting article. Thanks!

[CutePuppy]

... destroys the States surrounding the Gulf. Problem with this is that if the blowout oil ends up in the Atlantic, it’s going to bankrupt the North East and the Elitist Base of the Demoncrats.

Well, those states are doing a great job of destroying themselves with their economic policies (I Can Do Bad All by Myself) so politicians will only use the oil spill to blame the bad economy on "greedy" oil companies and their "bankers" and "rich Republicans" who are "in cahoots" with them...

But this Map of State Debt says a lot:

Map of State Debt

[CutePuppy]

... destroys the States surrounding the Gulf. Problem with this is that if the blowout oil ends up in the Atlantic, it’s going to bankrupt the North East and the Elitist Base of the Demoncrats.

Well, those states are doing a great job of destroying themselves with their economic policies (I Can Do Bad All by Myself) so politicians will only use the oil spill to blame the bad economy on "greedy" oil companies and their "bankers" and "rich Republicans" who are "in cahoots" with them...

But this Map of State Debt says a lot:

Map of State Debt

[CutePuppy]

If you dig a little deeper you will find NALCO is also associated with Warren Buffett, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, Soros, Apollo, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hathaway Berkshire.

i.e., with Club of Rome and UN's Agenda 21 - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2512355/posts?page=144#144

[Political Junkie Too]

The U.S. Coast Guard has complained that there is not enough plastic tubing in the United States to construct the booms needed to contain the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Just last week, this guy in Maine said he can make all the boom that the Coast Guard needs, but nobody's buying.

-PJ

[CutePuppy]

The system of booms employed by the Coast Guard is also passive, is only effective in calm water, and the skimming process used does a poor job of separating oil from water.

The design of the Euroskimmer was as dynamic as it was simple. It was a catamaran hull, covering six square meters of area, which gave it dependable buoyancy; no added wave motion sensors or controls had to be integrated. It had a hydraulic power pack and was operated manually by radio or a joystick. And it carried 100 meters (approximately 328 feet) of a discharge hose. But the true secret and success of the device was the “disc-adhesion” system that collected the floating oil like flypaper, the discs then spun like a wool on a spindle-whorl, thus separating oil from the seawater, and the collected materials were then discharged back through the hose to a base ship that stored the oil.

The Euroskimmer being lowered for a test run Norway, 1978. The Euroskimmer effectively removes oil from the surface of the ocean in all weather conditions and would be a huge advantage for the gulf Oil spill. However, it was abandoned in the 1990s.

[norraad]

I saw the same system work very well during a ‘created accident’ in the Delaware River a few years ago.