While BP has spent nearly two months either trying to stifle, plug or siphon the gusher results appear to be disappointing. On June 5 they claimed to capture 640,000 gallons and yet the "spill cam" looked like most of the oil was escaping into the ocean. BP is also employing clean-up crews to begin the labor-intensive process of cleaning decaying crude oil from the coast line of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Florida. CNN reporters have caught video images of many of their workers spending most of their time sipping water under pop-up tents instead of actually cleaning, so this effort is questionaable.
It may not be too facetious to say that God is doing his part. So far, the weather has kept the oil slick away from the dreaded "loop" current that would whisk the oil out of the Gulf around the Florida peninsula and north along the U.S. eastern seaboard. But we can't count on that forever, especially with hurricane season's official start on June 1st.
It's hard to tell what the hell the federal government has been doing. There is no question that Vice-admiral "Thad" Allen of the U.S. Coast Guard has been working hard monitoring the situation and coordinating efforts. In fact, he officially retired in May but he's still the operational commander. Kudos to him.
Congress, on the other hand, wants to criminally investigate BP. Good timing. BP's stock prices plummeted on that news. That removes money from BP's liquid assets that are going to be needed to pay for the repairs to the wellhead, cleanup effort as well as the loss of income from tens of thousands of Gulf residents who directly make their living from the sea.
President Obama is looking for whose "ass" to kick. Good for him.
With all this... up steps Kevin Costner, the star of the much-maligned movie "Waterwold", a forgettable movie. In the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 it occurred to his research scientist brother Dan Costner that there must be a way to separate oil and other fluids from water, as long as their specific gravity is different. What they developed was a high-speed high-capacity centrifuge. Since oil is lighter than water, when spun rapidly in a cylinder the water will pool around the outside off the cylinder while the oil will collect in the center of the fluid column. The oil is then pulled from the center while the water "spills" out of vents at the top of the center. Testing has shown that water heavily contaminated with Alaska crude was extracted with a better than 99% purity level.
He applied for a federal license from the U.S. Department of Energy in 1993 and the devices have been shown to work for nearly two-decades. Kevin Costner is a partner in the two companies that manufacture and sell these devices: Ocean Therapy Solutions (http://www.ots.org) and Costner Industries Nevada Corp (http://www.cincmfg.com). While these devices were designed with oil-spill cleanup in mind, they can be used for other purposes, such as water-contaminant removal. Considering the magnitude of the Prince William Sound contamination, you would have thought that these things would be purchased by the federal government and/or the oil companies by the dozens. Mr. Costner has to date sunk nearly $26 million of his own money into this idea, and was quoted by the London Mail in 2007 as having lost $40 million in all the technologies that his companies have invented. But for some reason, neither the U.S. federal government (especially MMS or DOE) or the oil industry seemed to be very interested in this technology.
Until now.
Mr. Costner is reported to have said that the ideal use would have been to immediately collect the oil/water from the gusher and process it. The largest unit that his company makes, a 2 1/2 ton stainless steel monster called the "V-20", can process 200 gallons per minute, or 12,000 gallons per hour. The other beautiful thing about his centrifuges is that they are chemical-free. That's right. No dispersants of any kind. Additionally, they are relatively mobile and easily installed on barges, sea platforms or ships. Ten of these devices theoretically can process 2.8 million gallons of fluid per day.
Why the hell aren't these devices on every drilling rig and oil platform? Why is there no stockpile of these devices?
Having reviewed the information from the literature on their websites, I'm comfortable in stating that had these devices been in place, the Gulf Coast would have seen little to no contamination.
If one assumes that these centrifuges work as advertised and the video shown on OTS.org is not doctored, then the fact that the MMS did not insist that there be a stockpile of these devices, purchased by the oil industry and stored by the federal government as a hedge against disasters such as this should be the real criminal investigation.
Mr. Costner and his companies are the proof of what people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other so-called "right-wing wackos" have been braying: Private entrepreneurs will always be the provider of solutions to our problems. Kevin Costner can apparently do what neither BP or the U.S. federal government cannot; turn oil back into water.
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