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?"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if Waterworld was the driver. (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to remember that a ship sank on the set of Waterworld, and they had to pay a tonne of money to clean up the resulting debris and spills. I can see how that lesson would have been a driver for developing a technology to make it cheaper. Scratch that itch!
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Interesting)
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'll bet that he wasn't the only one. A better question would be: would the same small company with the same clean-up technology garner as much congress attention and free press if it had not been headed and funded by a celebrity in the first place.
Personally, I doubt it. As a society, we're still obsessed by celebrities. Companies or non-profits backed by celebrities often have a huge media advantage over competitors that have no celebrity-backing.
Re:3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:0, Interesting)
Reclaimed Oil Scoreboard? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think we should have a scoreboard for his machines. Post the operating logs and create a scoreboard. How many barrel of crude oil Costner's company was able to reclaim from the ocean and multiply that by the cost of crude oil. Then compare that to the price tag Costner charged them.
They need a fleet of these machines able to be deployed anywhere in the world and they need to refine the machines or create others to bring the underwater plumes to the surface. The oil companies weren't ready when they should have been.
Re:3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are other machines like this (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not that noone's ever made machines like this; many have, and the "industry leader" is a company called Prosep from Canada.
Keep in mind that using these machines, as long as they're not absolutely perfect, violates the Clean Water Act, which mandates perfection so strongly that 95% solutions are penalized. The bureaucracy sat around for a couple months basically trying to decide whether to ignore the fact that Costner's machines, while good, violate their rules, more or less, which is why these machines are (as another poster pointed out) used much more outside the US than within it.
Re:I wonder if Waterworld was the driver. (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to remember that a ship sank on the set of Waterworld, and they had to pay a tonne of money to clean up the resulting debris and spills. I can see how that lesson would have been a driver for developing a technology to make it cheaper. Scratch that itch!
I worked on Waterworld, like half the people in Hollywood. What sank was that artificial island they built. I wasn't on set at the time but it was a mess and cost them months. They also shot the first two or three months without a final script so they mostly shot guys riding around on jet skis. That why there's so much footage of those. It was the most waseful shoot I was ever on.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:5, Interesting)
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
The Economist had an article on this. Maximizing shareholder value as a company goal is, interestingly enough, a recent phenomenon, from the 1970s.
The other two company goals that were apparently sidelined for maximizing profit were maximizing value for stakeholders (typically labor) or maximizing customer satisfaction.
We might be going back in the direction of the latter two.
Ancient Hacker FAIL: Open mouth after reading,... (Score:2, Interesting)
...not before.
Dumbass is quoting figures from the demonstration model.
The Costners' tech scales. They just build bigger machines for higher sized loads.
Well, actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:1, Interesting)
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'll bet that he wasn't the only one. A better question would be: would the same small company with the same clean-up technology garner as much congress attention and free press if it had not been headed and funded by a celebrity in the first place.
Personally, I doubt it. As a society, we're still obsessed by celebrities. Companies or non-profits backed by celebrities often have a huge media advantage over competitors that have no celebrity-backing.
apparently Costner has been trying to promote the tech at conferences for a couple decades, no one would take him seriously until the BP incidents. I don't think his celebrity necessarily has anything to do with anything in this case other than his being able to arrange meetings with people.
Re:Recycling (Score:4, Interesting)
Movie theaters make a pittance of a percentage of ticket sales the first week of a movie's run and, if there are subsequent weeks, it goes up a little each week, but that movie is going to have to run in that theater for a long, long time before the theater sees anything near 50% of ticket sales.
Movie theaters are really popcorn stores, and the movie is a loss leader to get you in the door.
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Interesting)
They already have to a large extent. The government didn't buy it, but if you check out the list of corporate names involved with Deepwater Horizon, you'll see a lot of corporations which are basically just fronts for BP.
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Theory vs Practice (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone who has half a fucking brain, when asked the question "How do we get this oil out of the ocean", will not say "dump chemicals into the ocean that cause the oil and water to become nearly inseparable". BP, on the other hand, says "who cares if we get the oil out of the ocean, it's not profitable, more important is that we dump dispersant onto the spill to make the ocean surface look better to avoid bad press".
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole thing is being treated as a PR exercise rather than a cleanup so this sort of thing is to be expected.
Cleanup ships were available, booms were available, the problem should have been attacked with logistics and engineering. Instead we mostly got a lot of bickering over how many barrels a day were leaking out (was 2000, then 5000, now 50000...and still rising) and doing everything possible to stop people making estimates by banning photography and dumping as many dispersants as possible into the mix before it could surface. CYA at its finest.
Dispersants don't make the oil disappear and are quite toxic in themselves so none of that solved anything, it just delayed it. We'll mostl likely be reading stories about new globs of pollution appearing in the gulf for decades to come.
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Interesting)
Typically you guard against this by instituting a capitalization requirement, ensuring that companies involved in drilling have the money and/or the insurance necessary to pay likely claims in case of an accident. This is, in fact, practiced in the oil industry. As far as BP is concerned, it passes this test with flying colors. It has been and will be substantially hurt by the spill (its stock price has lost half its value and it's had to suspend dividend payments -- that's an indication of the magnitude, although I think the market has overreacted, I don't think BP's lost nearly half its value over this incident).
Re:3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmmmm? I would think that progress happens when the reasonable man finds better ways of adapting himself to the world. I suppose you could look at it either way though. Again, a witty phrase proves nothing,
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Interesting)
They can when those tarballs are on the sand. Check out the machines from Beach-tech [beach-tech.com]. These machines use mesh to 'sift', and do not 'rake'. Raking breaks up the tarballs undesirably.
An interesting factoid is these machines work much better at night in the dark, because the colder temperature coagulates the tarballs better for easier removal.
Nothing to do with reasonable or not (Score:1, Interesting)
It is all to do with the dissatisfied man. Most people just go with the flow. That has always been the case, and always will be, because for a society to flourish there needs to be a core of stability and natural selection will ensure that the average person will just carry on regardless of the political system - despite their moaning.
A minority will be so upset and so compelled, that they do something about the system they hate so much. They are the people who change things. Helps if you are wealthy too.
There is also a small minority who are happy with the system and they will fight to keep it the way it is.
And there, you have the basis of all political systems and all political conflicts. Most people are drones.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:3, Interesting)
You didn't. But you did say "some kind of government involvement is necessary", so it's important to remember that they fuck up too.
Obviously.
Everybody fucks up.
And if it was just a matter of oops, well sprung a leak that'd be one thing...
But we've got evidence that they were having trouble for months before the actual blowout. And an argument that very morning about how best to seal things up for the switchover. And now we see that they've just been copying and pasting their emergency plan from one rig to the next, with no actual research into what it would take to deal with an emergency at any one particular location. And they very obviously didn't have a plan for how to deal with something like this, since they've been making it up as they go along.
All of which indicates a fairly clear disregard for the possibility of something going wrong.
Which isn't really surprising, considering that the Gulf of Mexico isn't really BP's problem. I mean, they're drilling there... But it isn't like that's their back yard. Or where they fish for a living. Or anything like that. BP can keep pumping oil in the middle of a polluted Gulf of Mexico. Or if they couldn't for some reason, they could just pick up and drill somewhere else.
I mean, let's be completely honest here... I'm sure BP would like to get this well under control and start pumping that oil profitably again. But, in the absence of any fines or anything like that - do you honestly think they'd put any time/money/effort into cleaning this mess up?
And that's why you need an organization bigger than BP that is concerned with the Gulf of Mexico, to make sure that something like this is taken care of.
No, our government hasn't done a very good job with this.
The regulatory agency that was supposed to make sure things like this didn't happen was in bed with the folks it was supposed to be regulating, and didn't do its job. Bureaucracy has gotten in the way at pretty much every step of the process. The whole thing has been completely politicized. The media has turned it into some kind of circus.
But that doesn't mean we don't need somebody bigger than BP to make sure they don't just walk away from a disaster like this.
What it means is that we need somebody bigger than BP, who actually does their job, to make sure they don't just walk away from a disaster like this.
Re:There are other machines like this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the same kind of misguided logic that makes people buy lottery tickets. Every day, millions of "visionary" inventors/pioneers/dreamers squander their time and savings on awful or/or unworkable ideas and dreams that fail miserably. But every blue moon one of them comes up with a good idea and succeeds. But no one does a news report on the millions who failed. Only the successes get publicized. This lionizes the inventor/pioneer/dreamer and creates the illusion that it's easier to succeed at such an endeavor than it actually is.
For the vast majority of people, it's quite sensible to avoid being a wild-eyed dreamer. The more outlandish your dreams, the more likely it is that pursuing them would be the equivalent of blowing your money on lottery tickets. The more realistic your dreams (i.e., the less wild-eyed), the more likely others will be willing to join your work and invest in them, making it unnecessary to blow all your money and time in the first place.
Telling people to "follow their dreams" is all well and good if their dreams aren't stupid. But the vast majority of dreams *are* stupid. Go to any high school in America and ask kids what they really dream about, and most of them will probably (if they're really being honest) answer something along the lines of "rap star," "rock star," "movie star," "sports star," etc. These kids would be much better off being "corporate drones" (as you so derisively put it) than wasting their lives trying to pursue those dreams, but people like you would have them go for it (to quote an old lottery advertising standard: "You can't win if you don't play!"). Thank god most people are sensible enough to be "corporate drones" or NOTHING would ever get done in this world.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:3, Interesting)
Your volumetric estimates are not incorrect, just inappropriate.
I read the article and envisaged this sort of machinery as being used to process the mix of oil and seawater collected by the various skimming options, so that the centrifuge discharges wet oily sludge (to be taken to shore for processing/ disposal) and large quantities of seawater which is much less contaminated with oil. Since the oil industry is already full of equipment for taking slightly oily water and cleaning it better (the UK requirement is to less than 50ppm / 0.005% v/v oil in water) prior to discharge over the side, then this is equipment possibly suitable for "front-ending" a spread of off-the-shelf hydrocyclones to process the spill debris.