Posted on 06/18/2010 12:29:22 AM PDT by CutePuppy
Machines that separate oil from water—even allowing the oil to be refined later—can be on-site in the Gulf of Mexico within days, Jean-Michel Cousteau, president and founder of the Ocean Futures Society, told CBNC Thursday.
Cousteau, who is backing the use of the machines, or units, is on the advisory board of Ecosphere Technologies, which makes them.
Cousteau, the son of legendary sea explorer and ecologist, Jacques Cousteau, said there are 24 to 26 units that are ready to go and in the region.
The units are mobile water treatment plants, which use a nonchemical oxidation process, Michael Vinick, chairman of Ecosphere Technology, told cnbc.com later on Thursday. Vinick said the units can be placed on barges and taken out to sea. Each unit can process one million gallons of water daily, added the chairman.
Vinick said the units are especially useful in the Gulf spill situation because they don't use chemicals, they break up hydrocarbons and they can handle high volume.
Vinick added that the oxygenation process brings much-needed oxygen to plant life in the marshes, which are robbed of it when they are coated with crude oil. The process of adding oxygen also revives sea life.
Cousteau said he has been talking with BP and government officials about employing the machines. The delay in putting the Ecosphere products to work, Cousteau believes, is not a matter of money, but of BP employees being busy considering many different options.
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Instead of pouring chemical dispersants down a pipe at the leak, the Ecosphere unit would be used to inject millions of oxygenated microscopic bubbles through the pipe to drive oil to the surface. The oil can then be captured in a boom and collected on-site. That machine will be available in one to three months, said Cousteau.
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(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Obama lied....the gulf coast died...
58 days of dicking around by the feckless wonder...
The next step our eerie recapitulation of Atlas Shrugged will be that the politicians will decide that the technology is too valuable for them to pay for it.
These companies should go out there and prove their worth to the clean-up. Put their machines in operation initially as a freebie, and then let whomever, BP or the government see their value, so they can make the decision to pay them for their efforts from then on out.
Haven’t you been paying attention? They’ll need at least six months to get a permit.
.....and a Coast Guard inspection.
And another thing, delaying any action on his part allows him to demand from BP even more money!
Do you think he would have gotten this $2 billion to give out to his 'friends/supporters' if he had dedicated the resources required and stopped this flow of oil within the first two weeks? The longer he can delay this crisis, the more money he can demand from BP, and eventually all the oil companies!
"Never let a good crisis go to waste!"
Problem is federal government bureaucracy, it's not that easy to just "go out there"...
Of course they need to do an enviornmental impact study on these new machines.
I’m sure by now everyone realizes that as far as Obama is concerned, it is not about stopping the oil flow or cleaning up the spill. The opportunity to clean up and contain the oil from reaching shore was lost on the 3rd day of the spill with Obama’s inaction. Now, nearly 58 days have gone by, the “intellectuals” have finally devised a plan to cripple American oil production in the Gulf and allowed an environmental and economic “crisis” to push “emergency” legislation to shakedown BP and the stockholders of BP and continue the “fundamental change” of America. I’ll never be convinced otherwise.
Yes, we need to determine whether the pollution control devices on the ship engines are sufficient. This process will take 5 to 7 years followed by a 3 year review and a 2 year licensing process. But before any of this can begin, we will need 4 years of input from the public. This is the fast-track method, which may not be legal. Hearing on the legality of fast-track will take 2 years.
Something is wrong here. Either they are declaring oxygen 'non-chemical' or the process is not oxidation.
On a related note:
Katrina and BP, Two Sides of the Same Coin
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/katrina_and_bp_two_sides_of_th.html
I’m sure OBummer will have a blue ribbon committee put together in a month or two to begin the process of looking into it.
I assumed the former... It's definitely oxidation process. Could be a mistake in wording (as in 'non-eco-harmful' chemical process) or imply that it doesn't use 'chemical' process to separate O from H2O.
he is right and more than one way to do it..many in the industry say the well could have been plugged the first week.
We can’t clean anything up if there is still any political mileage left in it!
It was 10 days after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig had exploded, and the company needed help containing the gush of oil. Six weeks later, Prestige has rented a factory, filled it with millions of dollars of new equipment, and hired 74 workers, up from six in April. Using material similar to the vinyl in awnings, Prestige is churning out 12,000 feet a day of booms, the floating barriers that help contain oil slicks. Prestige hopes to double its output, if it can hire 50 additional workers. ..... It’s a dichotomy present across the Gulf region. A sign on a shuttered seafood shop in Grand Isle, Louisiana, blames BP and President Barack Obama for its woes. Nearby motels and repair shops display Help Wanted signs for maids and mechanics to help with the crush of cleanup activity. Local caterers are aggressively advertising, trying to persuade BP to hire them to feed spill-response workers gathering on the coast. ..... ‘Mop Up Oil’ Plenty of other companies aren’t waiting for business to come to them. Shortly after the spill began, MOP Environmental Solutions Inc., a Bath, New Hampshire-based maker of a substance it claims absorbs up to 30 times its weight in oil, sent four employees to the Gulf to conduct demonstrations for cleanup officials. The MOP workers came armed with fish tanks, oil and the absorbing material in the trunks of their cars. Some of the company’s shareholders hired a local pilot to fly around the region with a banner reading, “We mop up oil.” After weeks of being pestered, BP purchased its first three truckloads of the oil-absorbent material for $155,000, MOP President Charles Diamond said. The company didn’t have to wait as long to get a full hearing as actor Kevin Costner. Costner’s company, Ocean Therapy Solutions Inc., uses barge-based turbines to separate water from oil. He first demonstrated the centrifuges to BP officials at a technology conference 10 years ago, but wasn’t given the go- ahead to test the gear in open water until earlier this month. Now Ocean Therapy says it has sold 32 of the centrifuges to BP. Corexit, Skimmers Another beneficiary of the cleanup is Nalco Holding Co. More than one million gallons of Nalco’s chemical dispersant Corexit, which breaks up oil slicks, have been used in the Gulf. The company sold $40 million of Corexit to BP through the week of May 15, according to spokesman Charlie Pajor. Some faraway businesses are profiting from producing or deploying equipment to get rid of the oil residue. The Slickbar Products division of Finland’s Lamor Corp. sent employees to Mississippi to help install its skimmers, which collect oil from the water, onto shrimp boats. Its oil-boom plant in Seymour, Connecticut, is operating at a pace not seen since the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. Slickbar has made more booms in the past month than it had in the previous 12 months, Chief Executive Officer Stephen Reilly said. There’s activity on land as well. Irving, Texas-based Fluor has a contract to supply BP with workers to clean up tar on Alabama and Florida beaches. So far it has hired 1,200 workers in Alabama and 2,400 in Florida, all of them off unemployment rolls in those states, said spokesman Brian Mershon. Fluor plans to increase its Florida workforce to 4,100. ..... Michigan’s depressed economy nearly toppled Grand Rapids-based awning maker Prestige Products. In April, the company’s fortunes changed when executive Brian Rickel got a phone call from an old contact at BP Plc.
Of course, Naperville, IL based Nalco Holding is a "special" case, but there is a lot of activity happening in the Gulf, while Democrats in D.C. are distracting our attention from productive activities in the Gulf by spewing tons of hot CO2 from their mouths.
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