BP has uploaded a new video to its YouTube channel of a press conference to introduce actor Kevin Costner's Ocean Therapy Solutions machine that will be used to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico.
Costner invested $26 million of his own money and more than a decade to build a filtering system that separates oil from water at a fast rate. BP approved the machines for testing last month.
BP's COO of Exploration and Production, Doug Suttles, said that within the first few hours of testing the machine, the company decided to order 32 of them.
"We tested it in some of the toughest environments we could find and actually what it's done -- it's quite robust," Suttle said. "This is real technology with real science behind it and it's passed all of those tests."
Suttles said BP has committed to building four deepwater systems. Two of the systems will be barges that have machines on them and two of the systems will be a new design using 280-foot offshore supply vessels.
In total, the systems BP is rigging up will have a processing capacity of 128,000 barrels a day....MORE
And from Next Big Future:
Kevin Costner spent $20 million over three years and hired a team of about 15 engineers and scientists to develop centrifuges to separate water from oil at up to 200 gallons per minute. In theory, twenty of the centrifuge devices could have cleaned up the Exxon Valdez spill in 5 days. BP has a contract for 32 of the centrifuges from Ocean Therapy Solutions (Kevin Costner's company) BP tested the devices for a week and they work.
Just one of the company's V20 machines can clean up to 210,000 gallons of oily water per day. There are 3 V20 centrifuge machines currently operational in the Gulf. Ten more should become operational within weeks. ”Once production at our factory in Nevada ramps up in July, OTS will be able to produce 10 machines a month,” said Pat Smith, Chief Operating Officer for OTS. ”We are currently ramping up production of new machines with a goal toward deploying the machines along the entire coast,” he said.
The Model V16 Centrifuge has a 5.00" (12.7 cm) diameter rotor. It has integrated Clean-In-Place and bearings on both the top and bottom of the rotor. It has maximum throughput of up to 90 GPM (gallons per minute)
The centrifuge machines are sophisticated centrifuge devices that can handle a huge volume of water and separate oil at unprecedented rates. Costner has been funding a team of scientists for the last 15 years to develop a technology which could be used for massive oil spills.
The machines are taken out into the spill area via barges, where they can separate the oil and water. The machines come in different sizes, the largest of which, the V20, can clean water at a rate of 200 gallons per minute. Depending on the oil to water ratio, the machine has the ability to extract 2,000 barrels of oil a day from the Gulf. Once separation has occurred, the oil is stored in tanks. The water is then more than 99% clean of crude....MORE
