Oil Clean-up Ideas

The huge oil leak under the sea from a British Petroleum drill site has drawn the interest of many amateurs who suggest ways of capping the leak. One local New Orleans radio station said it received more than 100 suggestion on one day recently. BP has set up a separate hotline in Houston to handle the flood of incoming proposals and, the company says, eventually forward them up the chain for their engineers to consider. Hmmmm Could be desperation and an admission that they do not know what to do.

Given BP's inept attempts to stop the damage, it may not be such a crazy source of solution. BP first tried the deep-sea robots. Then they put an underwater dome on top of the leak to trap the oil. Now they play with insertion tubes. All have failed miserably, except a small amount of success with the tube insertion, and most "experts" are having problems coming up with the solution to an oil break at one of the deepest levels ever drilled.

The strangest source of a clean-up panacea is from actor Kevin Costner. He suggests a $24 million oil-water separator that he says could clean every drop. Costner came forward last week with an oil spill cleanup technology he said he started devising after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Surrounded by local and state politicians here, he demonstrated a $24 million centrifuge device that he said could be placed on barges and used to suck in oily water, separate the oil and spit out mostly pure water."I'll put as many of these on the water to actually start cleaning up the water and taking out the oil, as opposed to surrounding it or watching it sink or hoping that it disappears, or blaming the next hurricane on dispersing it," Costner said. "We've been working in very crude ways. We see these images and we're going to see them tomorrow and we're going to see them the next day, and it feels feeble. It feels ineffectual." The only problem with Costner's idea (if you admit it would work) is that it might take 50 years or more to absorb all the oil. Too, every oil rig of the coast of Louisiana already has that same kind of old technology.

A large amount of ideas are cropping up on YouTube and across the Internet, with oil-cleaning techniques demonstrated in kiddie swimming pools and large mixing bowls. Other ideas sent to local government officials have suggested using a Navy sub to torpedo the well; spray huge amounts of grease busting Dawn dishwashing soap across the spill; or float enormous pumice stones near the well site to soak up the oil, oil eating bacteria, the "smart sponge," which manages to absorb only oil and permanently locks it inside the sponge, massive amounts of hay to soak it up.

And perhaps the best idea of all is the unlikeliest. Many seafood fisherman and locals who live along the coast point out that here has been crude oil on the Louisiana beaches and in the Marsh. It is unprocessed and it seeps out of the ground naturally. They claim that the environment will take care of itself. It always does.

Cleanup aside. I wonder what will happen to that oil/water in a month or two when hurricanes and tropical storms start swirling it and depositing it on towns an cities ashore. Then they may start speculating how to clean the oil off Bourbon Street in New Orleans.