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?"
Hmm (Score:2, Funny)
I wonder how he sent them the plans...
I bet he put them in an envelope and gave it to the postman.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Such a great book, and such a crap movie. Its a shame.
Well... (Score:2)
He wanted to get in on the lucrative go-juice [wikipedia.org] market, obviously.
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Nonsense, he was hoping to head off the bad guys in Waterworld before they got started!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterworld#Smokers [wikipedia.org]
I don't trust him (Score:5, Funny)
He's got webbed feet.
Re:I don't trust him (Score:4, Funny)
But he also dances with wolves, so he can't be all bad.
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The dude dropped too much acid back in the 70's . . . he hears voices . . . and has hallucinations about baseball fields, and shit . . .
Maybe if everyone on the coast does some Orange Sunshine, we can all just watch the oil separate itself from the water, and the oil will just walk away . . .
Heavy, man . . .
Re:I don't trust him (Score:5, Funny)
'The dude dropped too much acid back in the 70's . . . he hears voices . . . and has hallucinations about baseball fields, and shit . . .'
Yeah, stay away from that stuff. I had a really bad trip a few months back - ended up in a movie theatre where they must have been showing 'Dances With Wolves', but it looked like all the Sioux had changed into weird blue aliens who were COMING OUT OF THE SCREEN at me. Someone gave me a pair of shades but they just made it worse. Crazy shit.
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Actors.. (Score:2, Funny)
Oh yea...to me Chuck Norris was just a bitch-slapp
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Re:Actors.. (Score:4, Funny)
Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson
Kevin Costner also reached that level of actorness
Oh no you dih-unt.
3. Profit! 4. Fix the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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: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
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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,
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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 en
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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: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: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.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, it is know as the Tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org]
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'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: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.
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"I'll need a reference for the former."
What was stated was actually stated improperly. It's not a duty to maximize profits, the legal obligation is to MAKE MONEY for the shareholders. Failure to do so can result in a lawsuit against the operating officers by the board of directors (who are comprised of the controlling-vote shareholders.) It is a legal obligation, usually tied to the obligation of the shareholder to share the liability of debts.
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:5, Informative)
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit
That just flat out is NOT true. I wish people would stop regurgitating that on slashdot.
Corporations can and do have other purposes and goals than just "enhancing shareholder value".
This is an excellent summation [virginialawbusrev.org] of what I'm talking about. PDF link.
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.
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt it. If recent events in the business world have proven anything it's that modern companies exist to maximise the remuneration of management. Shareholders, stakeholders, customers and the existence of the company itself all come in second to making sure the executive officers get vast salaries, bonuses and exit packages.
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.
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Yet it is now held that this was a judicial mistake, and blindly citing it makes one look lame.
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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
Re:Maybe not the only one (Score:5, Funny)
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit.
So, if a company was able to maximise profits by boiling live babies, you'd be in favour of that? You monster.
Babies are tasty.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:4, Funny)
Thats easy to fix though. Just rm -r *.tar
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Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:5, Interesting)
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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 requireme
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: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.
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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: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)
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: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)
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).
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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:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:4, Informative)
I hate to be the bearer of bad news.... But oil cleanup and spill prevention has existed outside the US for decades. Thing is that the US offers a "bounty" on contaminated SEAWATER, not on reclaimed oil. So this technology has been of little intrest in the country where it was born. And at the same time, because countries like Norway, Denmark, the UK and many others are so adept at drilling at sea, they ofcourse have all reasearched in spill cleanup and even prevention. 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.
Similarly, noone in their right mind would have used chemicals in the case of the BP spill, simply because collecting the oil afloat is much simpler than if you weigh it down where you can't reclaim it, and it affects the eco system much more profoundly.
That said, if the existance of these centrifuges makes the US more practical in their approach to spill clean up and prevention, I'm all for it. And if they can supplement or improove on existing technology I dont really care who funded their development. It could have been Mickey Mouse as long as the technology gets to make a difference, instead of being buried.
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.
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I read somewhere that the blowout preventer had been damaged, and wasn't functioning correctly. And the operators knew this. You'd think the required action here would be to stop work until the blowout preventer was fixed, but no, apparently they only had a few days of work to go so they continued and hoped for the best (possibly under pressure from BP)
Re:Go Costner! Boo on BP! (Score:4, Informative)
Acoustic triggers are, by law, required on all offshore rigs in Norway and several other countries. Norway is, quite simply, the gold standard for sea drilling, and you have no idea what you are talking about.
More than a BOP (Score:4, Informative)
The devices that are mandatory in most of europe (funnily the home of BP being one of the exceptions, presumably because of the much more shallow waters they're drilling in there), are a little bit more than just the blowout preventer, it's a device which can be triggered in case of emergencies where the wireguided signals from the rig is unable to reach the BOP. They were, as best I can tell, developed after a problem with a platform sinking, same as what happened in the gulf.
Not being an engineer, I'm really at a loss to explain the difference between the BOP installed at BPs site and the ones that are generally being required by most other offshore oil producing countries. But from what the engineers explained to me, these remote controlled shutoff valves would have been able to stop the spill once the pipe had burst, assuming the blowout preventer ofcourse worked (which some people have questioned, since the installed "dead-mans-switch" didn't activate it).
From what I understand, it may have been that such valves were not installed because of the expense of installing them when drilling at these depths, and a furhter combination of BP not being required to use them, and also questioning of their effectiveness at these depths.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html [wsj.com] has some of the best graphics detailing the idea of the remote controlled switch. Again, the assumption being that the BOP is actually functioning. And from what I can understand, replacing or repairing a defective BOP IS possible.
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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: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.
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I think it's funny how the only plug against this whole centrifuge technology to clean up oil is based on what the end-quality of "oil" will come out of them?
It's not THAT funny. If you're not filtering out "decent quality oil", you might as well not use centrifuges at all and just pump the oil-water mixture into a tanker and ferry it to shore-based facilities. The quality of the oil coming out is an indication of the quality of the centrifuge. That, and the quality of the water coming out.
Centrifuge technology (Score:2)
I also understand that the Dutch also have technology to separate oil and water, though all I know about that is that it doesn't meet EPA regs for release water.
Still, even if a device/technique only had a 50% efficiency, as long as it was cheap it'd still be worth it...
IE take a 50/50 oil/water mix. After 'treatment' you store the 75% oil mix and dump the 75% water mix. Or, depending on how cheap/effective it is, you run the stuff through a second pass - store 88% pure oil and release 88% pure water. Su
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!
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IIRC, it was the whole atoll set! And they rebuilt another atoll, which is what caused the budget to be so huge.
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.
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It's only a very partial solution. (Score:2)
The problem is of course collecting the material to run through such a machine. If you wanted to clean a bucket of oily water - that's you solution. A spill at sea is different though. You obviously can't run the entire ocean through his machine - so it's a matter of collecting the right "parts" to do so.
This, of cours
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The problem is of course collecting the material to run through such a machine. If you wanted to clean a bucket of oily water - that's you solution. A spill at sea is different though. You obviously can't run the entire ocean through his machine - so it's a matter of collecting the right "parts" to do so.
Exactly so.
There is no imaginable scale-up of this technology that could handle a spill of even a 10th this size in the open ocean, or even Prince William Sound.
Currents disperse oil in sub-surface layers. You have to be able to intake water at various and sometimes extreme depths, in changing conditions.
10 thousand small versions of these couldn't begin to do the job, and gargantuan scale ups wouldn't be nimble enough.
These are best targeted toward protecting closed bays, river systems, marshes.
And they n
Theory vs Practice (Score:5, Informative)
TFA states that the machines are capable of separating 99% of the oil out of the water under ideal conditions, which would be soon after the oil began mixing with the water. Weeks/Months of time since the spill began, though, the water and oil mix becomes a frothy mousse which is more difficult to separate.
I hope that the machines are still capable of collecting the oil from this mousse, even if at a slower pace than the more freshly mixed oil.
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".
The only one? (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently the Dutch offered to send ships that could recover 97% of the oil a couple of months back, but they weren't allowed due to US environmental regulations:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-oil-spill-response-team-standby-us-oil-disaster [www.rnw.nl]
Re:The only one? (Score:5, Informative)
That article is old. The dutch ships have been working in the gulf for a while now.
http://www.examiner.com/x-325-Global-Warming-Examiner~y2010m6d15-Dutch-Skimmers-now-working-in-Gulf [examiner.com]
-b
Re:The only one? (Score:4, Informative)
They are now, after the fact that things are really, really bad.
They were rejected initially because they didn't purify the water "enough" for EPA standards. At first it was either because folks both at BP and government wanted to try the smoke and mirrors, "This is bad, but not *that* bad" until it became clear to everyone they were lying. Then it became a bureaucratic problem which after folks saw through the smoke and mirrors was quickly "solved" by taking the Dutch equipment and putting them on US ships and training the crews. Where as if we had allowed the dutch ships in to begin with, would have saved a lot of time.
Which begs the question, why wasn't action done by the government sooner? All it would have taken was an executive order to allow these skimmers in sooner saying that in this case they could purify the water "enough". Because even if they can't purify 100%, anything they are going to do is better than doing nothing.
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Which begs the question, why wasn't action done by the government sooner? All it would have taken was an executive order to allow these skimmers in sooner saying that in this case they could purify the water "enough"
"Never let a crisis go to waste" - Obama's Chief of Staff.
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Which begs the question, why wasn't action done by the government sooner?
Because the oil-men in the oil industry regulator (hmmm!) didn't see the need to be more prepared. (The oil industry itself thought that hoping that nothing would go wrong was a more profitable option than preparation for disaster. After all, wouldn't want to reduce the profits announced to Wall Street for the quarter...)
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No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
Procmail is even better!
Spill cleanup tech is not new or invented by Kevin (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:A ridiculous concept (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Your calculation is about 3 orders of magnitude too high:
(17000 square miles * 10 feet) / (100000 * 200 gallons per minute) = 3.37035066 years [google.com]
But taking into account how much is far below 10 feet deep (as you mentioned), it would take quite a long time.
Kevin says it's hopeless (Score:2)
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.
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.
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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".
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Those fine engineers with their top hat, top kill and junkshot. BP engineers really had this one under control, only took them 91 days to get it to stop gushing. I am sure if the .gov wasn't running around holding BP responsible, the spill would have been stopped much more quickly. By magic or something.
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Re:Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
Though much maligned, Waterworld did make a surprisingly decent profit in the end: $175m cost, with awful reviews and a mere $116m gross box-office in the US, but another $176m worldwide and pretty good DVD receipts as well.
So I suppose it's feasible Costner had a little left over for water-cleaning tech ;)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I liked Waterworld! Did people really hate it so much or is it just /.?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I still routinely watch it when I want something fun to watch.
And I had SO MANY Waterworld toys as a kid. That boat was KICKING RAD.
Re: (Score:2)
If it grossed 292 million, 146 million went to the theaters, and 146 million went to the studios. That's a loss,with no studio accounting tricks needed.
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and what's more, the 292 million figure is inflation adjusted, while the 175 million figure is not.
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You're forgetting VHS and DVD sales, rentals, licencing.
Waterworld may not have been The Dark Knight box office wise or anything, but it still was no Cutthroat Island.
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:Recycling (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. That would make it the only movie in Hollywood history to show a profit.
That Costner is a genius!