Yes, Kevin Costner the actor.
Yesterday, Mr. Costner appeared with his team from Ocean Therapy Solutions (OTS) before the U.S. Congress about their solution to the Gulf Coast oil spill. Apparently, long ago, when he was just a young half-human half-fish saving his friends from the maniacal Dennis Hopper (captain of the gigantic rowboat, Exxon Valdez) he developed bond with the ocean and a yearning desire to help keep it clean. 15 years and $20 million of his own money later, here’s his big chance.
The device that OTS has come up with in this 15 year quest is, basically, just a centrifuge. Take any oil and water mixture and spin it around for a while (or hard enough) and the denser oil will move to the outside and the thinner water will collect on the inside. Voila! We’ve been using this method to separate substances for a couple hundred years but, as they say, the devil is in the details. How do you get the stuff in? Do you work in small batches or is there a way to make the process continuous? How do you get the stuff out? And, of course, with all the salt in that pesky ocean, how do you keep the machinery from rusting before lunchtime?
OTS appears to have come up with answers to most (if not all) of these and other problems. I don’t know what they are (…yet), but they have demonstrated their technology and it appears to work. While the industry was content to tout the latest innovations in floating barriers, chemical dispersants, and fancy helicopters, OTS has produced something that may actually help with the problem.
Admittedly, the pump that OTS has designed is meant to be a first-response device. Catch it while the spill is small, and the darling device should have no real trouble sucking out the oil. Neither Mr. Costner not his teammates know whether their pumps will be effective at helping to clean up the gazillion gallons of oil in the Gulf – it’s a LOT bigger than they probably ever imagined. But with the efforts of both BP and the Feds not seeming to make much headway, America is ready to see some good news.
The U.S. Congress, citing a trillion and a half in deficits, won’t be standing on queue to purchase these devices. I don’t think they needed to justify it that way. If oil companies had these devices lying around as oil spill insurance, the government could contract the oil companies to clean up messes that get out of hand – why own the equipment when you can lease it? And BP has ordered 32 of them and hopes to drive them around in small boats and try to clean up about 6 million gallons of this mess per day.
If that just means keeping pace with the spill itself, I think it’s a big win…one America would like to have seen a few weeks ago. And if the technology proves itself on this battlefield, I don’t think oil companies will be able to afford not having such devices in their oops-correction stockpile. We may yet see the end of disastrous oil spills.
And what of Kevin Costner? His love of the ocean, and subsequent investment and nurturing of technology to clean it, may very well have rescued it in dramatic fashion.
Save the ocean, save the world!
