Kevin Costner - He built it, and BP came.

[Beeyon]

I'm a bit familiar with these devices. They were not designed as oil water separation units like Costner keeps saying. CINC centrifuges were originally meant to be liquid-liquid contacting units.

I would imagine they would work great once the mixture enters the water. The difficulty is in deploying the units in such a way that minimizes all the water that doesn't need to be processed.

 

[trvlr2]

Bolding mine.

1) it can make water 97% pure, and oil 97% pure. So...any ratio?
2) As deep as hoses can reach and still maintain vacuum and pressure.
This needs clarification. Will it separate the gas from the oil? I see a limitation in depth, for the same reasons that the cap has to have methane injection. The problem with sucking all the oil up, from depth, is the mix of water and gas entrained forming hydrates.

3) Tell me how effective those others are.

Not very.

4) The machines he has can do 200 gallons per minute. So, 288k per day, but assuming there's a slowdown for jams or whatever, maybe 250,000 gallons a day. BP bought 32 of them. That's 8 million gallons per day. And that's only if the purchase of these, and other funding, allows the building of an increased capacity machine.

Using your 259K gallons/day, the current machine would separate slightly more than a 30Foot cube of mix. There's an awful lot of those in a cubic mile. Say about 806,000 of them.YMMV, I used an obselete NM conversion.

Quote:
Soapy Sam Be interesting to hear an after the event analysis of how effective the system is.
There's no doubt this tech has lagged- perhaps because a lot of people have gone to a lot of trouble not to get oil in the water in the first place.

Anyway- kudos to Costner.

Right, we've seen how effective this can be.
Point is, one should consider the worst case scenario, then update frequently. Hard to consider/develop drainage options, when you've been plunged into the alligator infested swamp. Which is what is happening now. IMO.

 

[quadraginta]

I like 3000 Miles to Graceland.

Bull Durham was okay.

Dances With Wolves was just fine.

 

[Dorian Gray]

OOoh OOOH! Can I be first to say The Big Chill?

Seriously, though, how about Silverado? Come on.

 

[Stacko]

Where's the love for Field of Dreams?

 

[davefoc]

Using your 259K gallons/day, the current machine would separate slightly more than a 30Foot cube of mix. There's an awful lot of those in a cubic mile. Say about 806,000 of them.YMMV, I used an obselete NM conversion.

I think this is the main issue regarding its effectiveness. If the idea that it is just a better extractor and you need to combine it with skimmers to make much of a dent fine, but then it doesn't sound like a big advance. They have skimmers and they have extractors.

If the claim is that this thing is so efficient that it can be just set out where the oil is disbursed in the water column and pump so much water that it can make a significant dent on cleaning up the volume of water that the oil is disbursed in then I'm a little skeptical.

It is true that BP has bought many of them which is evidence that they might be effective at some kind of clean up, but BP is also dealing with a public relations nightmare (having a CEO who has a penchant for saying exactly the wrong things and in general acting be friggin jerks isn't helping their PR problems) and spending a few bucks to look like they're doing something even if it's bogus seems like something they might do.

It may also be possible that the things can be deployed in some way so as to intercept a dense volume of the oil plume and because of their superior pumping/extracting efficiency they can work where other approaches won't.

So far, I haven't seen any data that sheds much light on this.

 

[Dorian Gray]

It's possible that the funds will allow the development of devices that can process a larger volume per minute.

 

[Ausmerican]

If his machine works, 3000 cheers for Kev (3 isn't enough).

WRT his movie career, perhaps it would be better to ask a different question.

Rather than ask, "has KC been in any good movies?" a more pertinent question may be, "Has KC been good in any movies?" He has always struck me as very bland.

 

[Sledge]

He was alright in The Untouchables.

 

[gnome]

Actually I'm a huge fan of Bull Durham.

 

[quadraginta]

Actually I'm a huge fan of Bull Durham.

The ex-Mrs. qg and I got to be friends with some of the production crew while they were filming here (they got to hanging out at the restaurant where she was wait staff, and started coming by our house to party. )

We were watching from the center field bleachers the night they did most of the filming for the dream sequence where "Meat" is pitching naked with a garter on. It was cold, and I felt sorry for the stand-in. He was out there for hours!

Bull Durham holds an extra-special place in my heart because I spent many happy afternoons and evenings at the old DAP (Durham Athletic Park) where it was filmed, with my two boys, watching baseball the way it was meant to be watched, in a small, gritty, old ballpark with soggy dogs, warm beer, a trench in the restroom floor for a urinal, and regulars staking out the good(?) parking spots on the streets around the park where foul balls wouldn't take out their windshields. Hopefully.

Those were the days.

 

[Porkchop Express]

If his machine works, 3000 cheers for Kev (3 isn't enough).

WRT his movie career, perhaps it would be better to ask a different question.

Rather than ask, "has KC been in any good movies?" a more pertinent question may be, "Has KC been good in any movies?" He has always struck me as very bland.

Him narrating "Dances with Wolves" killed it for me. Bland is putting it nicely, actually.

 

[rightbrain]

If he stops making films as well, he'll have done a lot to make the world a better place.

Amen.

As for winning an Oscar--that's not evidence of anything. This is the Academy that voted "Kramer vs. Kramer" best picture for 1979...over "Apocalypse Now."

Still, my hat's off to Costner if he contributes to cleaning up this mess.

 

[gnome]

The ex-Mrs. qg and I got to be friends with some of the production crew while they were filming here (they got to hanging out at the restaurant where she was wait staff, and started coming by our house to party. )

We were watching from the center field bleachers the night they did most of the filming for the dream sequence where "Meat" is pitching naked with a garter on. It was cold, and I felt sorry for the stand-in. He was out there for hours!

Bull Durham holds an extra-special place in my heart because I spent many happy afternoons and evenings at the old DAP (Durham Athletic Park) where it was filmed, with my two boys, watching baseball the way it was meant to be watched, in a small, gritty, old ballpark with soggy dogs, warm beer, a trench in the restroom floor for a urinal, and regulars staking out the good(?) parking spots on the streets around the park where foul balls wouldn't take out their windshields. Hopefully.

Those were the days.

I must admit, part of the reason I'm a fan is positive association. It was playing in the background during very good dates on three separate occasions

 

[r-j]

But one wonders why this hasn't been developed to a much higher level by people/companies/governments with tons of cash.

Yes. These companies make obscene profits, and they don't spend a single dime on any technology to fix and repair things if something goes wrong?

I will bet money that in Alaska they have nothing to clean up oil if another ship was breached. Not one single device.

 

[jadebox]

4) The machines he has can do 200 gallons per minute. So, 288k per day, but assuming there's a slowdown for jams or whatever, maybe 250,000 gallons a day. BP bought 32 of them. That's 8 million gallons per day.

There's something like 650 quadrillion gallons of water in the Gulf of Mexico. About 1/4 of the Gulf has been closed to fishing so that gives us an estimate of about 160 quadrillion gallons of water that needs to be cleaned. At 250,000 gallons a day, it will take .... uhh ... about 47 million years to clean the water.

-- Roger

 

[r-j]

I'm pretty sure oil floats on water. So you don't have to run the entire ocean through the machine.

 

[jadebox]

I'm pretty sure oil floats on water. So you don't have to run the entire ocean through the machine.

"Vast underwater concentrations of oil sprawling for miles in the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged, crude-belching BP PLC well are unprecedented in 'human history' and threaten to wreak havoc on marine life, a team of scientists said today, a finding confirmed for the first time by federal officials." -- http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/0...ed-by-size-density-of-undersea-oil-98517.html

Anyway, even if I were off by a factor of a million, it would still take 47 years for these machines to clean the ocean.

-- Roger

 

[r-j]

Then they better get started.

 

[Michael Redman]

A short term effective use might be to boom off critical coastal areas and remove the oil that gets through or has already gone to the shore.