Grooved Disk Spinner Cleans Up: $1M For Winner of Oil Recovery Challenge

cylonlover writes "Last July, in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the X PRIZE Foundation launched the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE. As with previous X PRIZE competitions, this one was intended to encourage private sector scientific research, by offering a cash prize to whichever team could best meet a given challenge. In this case, teams had to demonstrate a system of their own making, that could recover oil from a sea water surface at the highest Oil Recovery Rate (ORR) above 2,500 US gallons (9,463.5 liters) per minute, with an Oil Recovery Efficiency (ORE) of greater than 70 percent. Today, the winning teams were announced with the US$1 million first prize going to Team Elastec/American Marine for their unique grooved disc skimmer."

Kevin Costner?

[Grizzley9]

What ever came of those oil cleaners that Kevin Costner's company supposedly had. I saw articles and remember about BP buying a few and using them but nothing after that. Were they effective? Better than the article winner? Just a PR move for BP? It says BP wanted about 32 and even had some set sail in July 2010 but after that all I see is a Slashdot article discussing it http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/18/2035238/ieee-looks-at-kevin-costners-oil-cleanup-machines [slashdot.org]

The only thing I could find close to a follow up in the popular press was from this July reviewing how well it worked and some of the failures (clogging with "peanut butter type" oil and such) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/12/bp-kevin-costner-deepwater-horizon-spill [guardian.co.uk]

US regulations prevent this from being used

[Anonymous Coward]

US regulations require that any water dumped back into Sea is almost completely clean (10 parts of oil per million)
EU regulation requires oil cleaners to output water that is cleaner than they took in and must be atleast 90 water.
As a result the EU emergency response fleet (that is on standby at all times and was easily capable of containing the horizon spil) was not allowed to assist.

The problem with the horizon was one of defective government not technology. No X prize is going to improve that

Target ORR

[afidel]

Isn't the target ORR for the competition too low? I thought one of the biggest hurdles encountered during the cleanup was that the it was illegal for the ships to discharge partially treated water even if they had removed a significant percentage of the oil and so the only legal solution was to tanker the partially treated water and take it to a land based facility which could more thoroughly separate it. Personally I think the EPA (or whatever the responsible enforcement authority was) should have temporarily suspended the rules but that makes too much sense for the government.