IEEE Looks At Kevin Costner's Oil Cleanup Machines 289
richardkelleher writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look at the machines developed by a company funded by Kevin Costner that are supposed to extract the oil from the Gulf waters. Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?"
3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you throw enough Linguini at the wall eventually something will stick.
You will never get anything to stick to the wall if you never try.
This is why freaks like RMS end up achieving something and the rest of us "sensible" people just end up as corporate drones.
Maybe not the only one (Score:2, Insightful)
' Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?'
Well, he may not have been the only one, but it's obvious that the oil companies weren't; after all, they're only the causes of the problem!
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you should read the article again. :)
The problem with the centrifuges is not the quality of the oil coming out. It's that they don't deal well with tarballs or dispersants. They need liquid oil so that it can be separated by spinning it.
Since you're spinning it to get the oil to rise to the top, if it doesn't flow (tarball), or doesn't separate (dispersant), the device ain't going to work. That is what the article was saying.
"he worries that much of the oil being picked up now will be too heavily degraded or contaminated
with dispersants to be easily separated."
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:5, Insightful)
Well why should they? They only have to look after the interest of the shareholders and thats maximising Profit Baby!*
* may not be true but thats how it seems to be in practice.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit. That's how it works. They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money. I wouldn't really expect a corporation to invest money into something like developing technology to clean up oil spills unless it could demonstrate that the technology would somehow earn the shareholders money.
You could make the argument that if BP (or Exxon or whoever) developed the technology they'd be able to sell it to others... Or minimize the fines/cleanup that they have to pay for... But, the way things actually work in the real world, there's little point in that. Business as usual makes more than enough money.
Which is why, much as some people hate to admit it, some kind of government involvement is necessary.
You can regulate the oil companies - force them to invest some amount of their profits into cleanup R&D.
Or you can fund your own R&D project to develop the technology.
But, as we've seen, The Market isn't interested in this stuff.
Re:3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why freaks like RMS end up achieving something and the rest of us "sensible" people just end up as corporate drones.
Now, for the first time in a long time, I don't feel so bad about being a corporate America reject.
I just need to find some great thing to do....
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. A business model that's only profitable when there's a disaster (natural or man-made) isn't going to have a predictable source of income. That is, unless the company making the disaster-solution product is also put into a position where it can create disasters-- in which case, you don't actually want that.
So you have something which may be necessary but in which the "free market" will probably never invest. And after all, no one company really has enough of an interest in the Gulf of Mexico to pay for it to be cleaned up. BP didn't even have enough of an interest in the Gulf to prevent the spill from happening in the first place.
A ridiculous concept (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a reason nobody's invested in this technology-- the numbers are just impossible.
Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....
1,830 years
to process that amount of water.
And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:3, Insightful)
'A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit.'
Corporations don't have goals, stakeholders do :) (/pedantic) The maximization of profits is a requirement of law and a desire of the shareholders.
One can as well have a legal regime in which corporations are organizations for the provision of goods and/or services for the benefit of people and for which the generation of profits is a cost needed to entice investment for capital.
Re:I don't trust him (Score:1, Insightful)
Whatever - in Europe and other parts the oil spill collection technology is developing silently and is building on existing technology.
The problem isn't the existing tech - it's a political issue.
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:4, Insightful)
For instance, it's the LAW to equip all wells with a remote controllable shutoff valve if you want to drill in the north sea. A device which could easily have prevented the BP spill, but wasn't used, because it wasn't a requirement.
Sure about that? The accident blew through the blowout preventer.
I remember reading about the pressures involved, they're higher than present in most guns...
I'm not sure a separate shutoff device would have functioned itself, otherwise I'd have expected them to have gotten the well shut off a lot quicker - simply drop a valve onto the remains of the header, weld it on however they need to, then shut the valve. Not spend three months designing something that wouldn't look out of place on a rocket.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:5, Insightful)
> The maximization of profits is a requirement of law and a desire of the shareholders.
I'll believe the latter - I'll need a reference for the former.
I'll float a completely uninformed opinion... I think that the "legal requirement" for corporations to "to maximize profits and nothing else, within the limits of the law," is a bit of revisionist history designed to make sociopathic behavior expected and acceptable. I can accept that I may be wrong on this, but I do know that this type of language is something that seems to have come into normal usage only in the last 10-20 years, and I have a longer memory than that. Prior to that, "corporations were in business to make money," was commonly understood, but this concept that if they do anything else they're shirking their "responsibility" is new. Maybe it's really that stockholders have gotten more sociopathic. But I would have sworn that stockholder lawsuits were born in corporate mismanagement, not in failing to be sociopathic profiteers.
Re:3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called the "Unreasonable Man Paradox"
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me cynical, but it would never happen. Instead, oil companies would take a lesson from Hollywood, and make every single oil well its own corporation, so any disaster would be insulated to a single small corporation that goes broke.
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:4, Insightful)
Presumably the tarballs are solid. Can't they just use a mesh to pick them out before they go into the centrifuge?
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, dispersants were a bad idea since the ultimate plan was to get all that lost oil back. Raise your hand if you saw that one coming.
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Insightful)
Many things, valve included, have difficulty turning when stuff blows up and cuts off power and/or communication to the controls.
There have been solutions to those problems for many years. The deep water blowout preventers required for North Sea operations have to automatically shut off unless a positive control signal is continuously applied. I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere. Equipment that will properly do the job already exists, we just need to make it unprofitable to not use it.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no requirement that a corporation make money, or that if it does that the shareholders get paid any of the profits. There is no requirement that the board of directors be composed of shareholders at all, let alone those with large percentages of the voting shares.
The board of directors and the officers have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. This means that they must use the investment money responsibly, and should actually be trying to earn money for the company and the shareholders. The laws are basically there to prevent someone from starting a company, getting investment money, and then "losing" all of it due to poor decision making (paying themselves all of the investment money as a salary, for example).
Even if there were a requirement to maximize profits, that is a vague phrase. Maximize over what time scale? A financial quarter? A year, a decade, a century ...? You can't spend any money on research if you're maximizing for the quarter, but it sure helps in the 10-100 year time frame. Spending money on clean-up technology is a bit like paying for insurance. Neither is a good investment until something bad happens.
Of course none of this prevents shareholders from suing officers and directors, but that's not because they actually have a good reason to.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:3, Insightful)
Invested? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?
I'm certain the answer to that question is "No". Lot's of money has been invested. Smaller spills are quietly cleaned up. But this one was so big the politicians felt the need to get involved instead of letting the engineers who know what they're doing handle it. Of course, 'involved" mostly meant running around helplessly shouting "someone's going to pay for this".
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:3, Insightful)
The idealistic notion you describe in the first part is exactly how laws started out. We ended up with the situation you describe in the second part because idealistic notions rarely, if ever, work in the real world.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:4, Insightful)
I've no idea why this is moderated "Funny". It's what I perceive too -- directors run companies for their own benefit, all other considerations appear to be secondary.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet it is now held that this was a judicial mistake, and blindly citing it makes one look lame.