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Posts Tagged ‘oil leak’

Aeros (Airborne Robotic Oil Spill Recovery System) is a fleet of airplane-deployed robots that cordon off the oil and use centrifuge-like oil/water separators to collect oil for refining. Each ’bot can purify up to 3,000 gallons of water a minute. Several could clean an 11-million-gallon, Exxon Valdez–size spill in a few days.

Global Response Group, Aeros’s developer, is building its first prototype robot to test on an experimental oil spill next year. The company is also in talks with the Chinese government to establish the first Aeros airbase, which will deploy ’bots to protect that country’s fishing waters from offshore drilling. It will cost $800 million, a small fee compared with the billions of dollars in damage that a spill can cause.

Spills present challenges for any cleanup. “Booms don’t work well with big waves,” says oil expert Greg McCormack of the University of Texas. But the industry is eager for new strategies, he says, and will embrace Aeros if the prototype works. Aeros’s inventor, Myron Sullivan, says it will. “It needs fine-tuning,” he says, “but the technology is proven. There will be another disaster. All we can do is prepare for it.”

How It Works
1. ’Bots Away! Planes drop minivan-size water-cleaning robots and inflatable booms near the spill site.
2. Trap the Spill Once inflated, the U-shaped booms surround the oil. Robots use GPS to get behind a boom’s flap, which directs water into the ’bot’s cleaning system.
3. Clean The robot sucks oily water into a cone that spins the liquids, sending denser water to the outside and creating a stream of oil in the center. Low pressure at one end draws oil away while the heavier—and 99 percent clean—water flows out the other side.
4. Collect the Black Gold A bladder collects the oil, which crews pick up later to recycle. One robot can clean up to 3,000 gallons of water per minute, scrubbing the affected area in just a few days.

After installing the new cap on the broken Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, and then fixing a last-minute crack in the cap, BP has announced this afternoon that, for the first time since April, the flow of oil from the well has completely stopped.

An integrity test on the 75-ton cap is underway, to make sure it will continue to hold back the flow until a permanent solution is in place.

Over 150 million gallons of oil are estimated to have flooded into the Gulf of Mexico since the blowout on April 22.

[CNN]

Seshadri Ramkumar, who holds the excellent title "associate professor of nonwoven technologies" at Tech's Institute of Environment and Human Health, developed Fibertect to protect U.S. service members in the event of a chemical or biological attack. The material consists of a fibrous activated carbon layer sandwiched between two layers of raw, nonwoven cotton. The cotton layers effectively absorb oil -- even oil that's dispersed in water -- while the carbon core pulls it in and contains it.

To see this effect work in the lab check out the video below, but Fibertect's commercial distributor, First Line Technology, wanted to see it work in the Gulf. The company sent a sales rep who also contracts with BP to try Fibertect out Grand Isle in Louisiana, one of the beaches contaminated by the ongoing oil leak. When Fibertect was placed on a blob of oil that had washed ashore, the oil stuck to the material and the Fibertect wouldn't release it.

But what really sets Fibertect apart from other absorbent materials is its ability to also absorb and contain the toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon vapors that have been making cleanup workers sick along the Gulf shore. Its ability to contain both liquids and vapors makes it an ideal candidate for the kind of remediation efforts needed along the Gulf shore. Add to that the fact that Fibertect is fully biodegradeable -- unlike many of its polypropylene counterparts -- and Ramkumar and company could be onto something.

The video below shows Fibertect pulling motor oil right off the surface of a tank of water and holding onto the oil as the water drips back out. It's easy to imagine the crews currently cruising the Gulf integrating a material like this into their booms and skimmers to mitigate damage to the coastlines, or to clean up oil birds and other affected wildlife.

[Texas Tech via Discovery News]

The article also details that the Macondo well was known to be a "nightmare well" long before the blowout, and that BP cut financial corners again and again in its construction.

Read the whole story here.

Plus, Bill Nye explains: What the #&$% is a top kill?

The Coast Guard gave BP the go-ahead this morning, and the latest attempt to seal off the Gulf oil leak that is quickly turning into the biggest ecological disaster in history began at 2 p.m. eastern time. And as BP scrambled to get its controversial "top kill" underway, the media scrambled to figure out exactly how to describe this riser-capping procedure to the public.

But (perhaps unexpectedly) CNN went directly to the best possible source for all things technical, a video explanation so thorough that we've included it below. The top kill, as explained by Bill Nye The Science Guy.

Of course, the chances of the top kill succeeding are good but not great; BP's CEO admits the chances of stopping the oil flow with a drilling mud/concrete one-two punch sit somewhere between 60% and 70%. If it fails, it could make the environmental mess even worse, releasing the toxic materials present in drilling mud -- which can be a variety of things but usually includes some trace amounts of elements like zinc, nickel, chromium, copper, lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury -- into the Gulf's ecosystem. Check out the live feed of the top kill below and keep your fingers crossed.

If the top kill doesn't work, BP will have to turn to yet another backup plan. Right now, it seems that plan is to use what's known as a low marine riser package (LMRP) to try to seal off the flow of seawater into the well. Even if engineers can't keep the oil in, they might at least be able to keep the seawater out, preventing the formation of the methane ice that thwarted the earlier effort of deploying the containment dome.

Why hasn't BP already deployed the LMRP? That's unclear. In fact -- and we're not trying to demonize here, but it is getting a bit annoying -- BP doesn't seem very receptive to ideas coming from outside the company. The public has drummed up a range of solutions, everything from deploying oil absorbent materials laced with petrol-eating microbes to the SQUID, an admittedly condom-like system that seems like it could quickly help contain the mess (perhaps it's worth noting that the success rate for the average Trojan is better than 60%).

BP says it could be a couple of days before we know if the top kill was a success. If not, it's on to the next idea (which happens to sound a lot like most of the old ideas). Since BP doesn't seem to be doing much thinking outside of the containment dome, feel free to share your leak-plugging schemes in the comments.

[CNN, Fast Company, Discovery News]