Posted on 06/19/2010 8:11:50 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Actor's Machine Designed to Separate Oil and Water, BP: Tests Confirm Device Works.
After actor Kevin Costner spent weeks calling attention to a high-tech oil cleanup device his company spent years developing, BP tested the machine and overnight released a statement saying that not only does the device work, officials are "excited" about its potential.
"We were confident the technology would work but we needed to test it at the extremes. We've done that and are excited by the results," said Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer. "We are very pleased with the results and today we have placed a significant order with OTS [Costner's Ocean Therapy Solutions] and will be working with them to rapidly manufacture and deploy 32 of their machines."
The machine is a centrifuge designed to separate spilled oil from water and, according to Costner, could be instrumental in cleaning up the massive oil slick expanding in the Gulf.
Costner has spent the past 15 years and more than $20 million of his own money to develop the oil separator, which during successful testing, left water 99 percent clean of crude.
"If 20 of my V20s [machines] would have been at the Exxon Valdez, 90 percent of that oil would have been cleaned up within the week," he said, referring to one of the models of the oil separators.
Costner told "Good Morning America" anchor Sam Champion Monday that he became inspired to work on the device after watching coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
That spill occurred off the coast of Alaska when the supertanker Exxon Valdez hit a reef in 1989. Approximately 11 million gallons of oil spilled into Prince William Sound, causing widespread harm to the local wildlife, environment and economy.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Avant garde composer George Antheil, a son of German immigrants and neighbor of Lamarr, had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, including his music for Ballet Mecanique, originally written for Fernand Léger’s 1924 abstract film. This score involved multiple player pianos playing simultaneously.
Together, Antheil and Lamarr submitted the idea of a secret communication system in June 1941. On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and “Hedy Kiesler Markey”, Lamarr’s married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.
The idea was ahead of its time, and not feasible owing to the state of mechanical technology in 1942. It was not implemented in the USA until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba[6] after the patent had expired. Perhaps owing to this lag in development, the patent was little-known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr an award for this contribution.[1] In 1998, Ottawa wireless technology developer Wi-LAN, Inc. “acquired a 49 percent claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock” (Eliza Schmidkunz, Inside GNSS);[7] Antheil had died in 1959.
Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones.[8] Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam’s 1920 patent Secrecy Communication System (1598673) seems to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil’s patent which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but she was told that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at just one event.
For several years during the 1990s, the boxes of the current CORELDRAW software suites were graced by a large Corel-drawn image of Hedy Lamarr, in tribute to her pre-computer scientific discoveries. These pictures were winners in CORELDRAWs yearly software suite cover design contests. Far from being flattered, however, Lamarr sued Corel for using the image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. They reached an undisclosed settlement in 1999.[9]
You realize that they wouldn't have to get at anywhere near all the water in the Gulf. A fleeting fraction probably. Lets do some math. 200gpm*60min/hour*24hours/day*60days(since the accident)*32units= 552,960,000 gallons, which could have been a good start, and it is certainly better than nothing. It needn't be the only tool in the arsenal.
My guess is that BP is purchasing them more for publicity than for the quantity of water they clean.
Now about that, you could be absolutely correct.
Yeah but you suck it up where the oil is
"That's Hedley!"
can you resize that
Yeah the magnitude of the spill seems beyond the capability of these machines. Maybe they would be useable where oil is collecting near shore.
Almost sounds like the Gulf crude oil that is salvageable may become a new “black gold rush” of entrepreneurs storing the crude as salvage and then reselling it. Good old boys collecting the oil in every conceivable container, tanker or tub.
Obviously its salvageable and can still be refined, at the very least it can be used for roofing purposes or highway asphalt.
Or with some modest investment in simple straining and refining it can become a diesel fuel blend.
Now wait and see anybody without a license will be arrested if caught hauling off the crude oil for profit.
LOL...it’s a good thing I saw your teeny tiny sarcasm disclaimer because I was just about to light into your post...thanks for putting it there...although it took my magnifying glass to seeeee it. :)
It’s not so much that an actor can be smart — but rather — that BP is as stupid as it is shown to be .... yeeeooow!
Maybe. Depends on how many you use. Depends on if you use other containment and recycling methods at the same time.
Also depends on how long your wait to start.
Is the recoverable oil/tar flotsam or jetsam?
LOL, yeah, it came out smaller than I expected..
Costner will be running for something soon, since his film career ain’t all that anymore.
Thats what Mrs Al baby says
A solution that actually helps the environment,
captures leaked oil AND solves the cleanup problem?
This cannot be. A crisis is necessary to keep
the sheeple in fear. Fear is the freedom killer
and the tool of government.
God bless Kevin Costner!
That was going to be my question. The Dutch ships use gravity to separate the oil and water, which I think would be much more environmentally friendly.
bookmark.
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