On 2010.Apr.20, BP (British Petroleum) et al made a terrible mistake, resulting in an explosion on and sinking of the Deep Horizon offshore oil-drilling platform, breaking the feeder pipe in 3 places, resulting in gushing of crude oil and gas from each. (WikiPedia)
A few days later, before the spill got very large, I proposed a way to skim off the oil from the surface of the water, and telephoned Anna Eshoo's office to ask her to relay my idea to people closer to Obama and BP so that they might consider my idea. Basically my idea was to surround the (at that time small) surface oil-slick with small craft, each equipped with a large funnel (perhaps the size of a children's wading pool) that is slightly heavier than water, hung from floats (like "bobs" used for fishing) so that the top of the funnel is slightly under the surface of the water, so that surface water with oil can flow over the top of the funnel and into the funnel, with a hose connected from the bottom of the funnel over to the craft, where a centrifuge "vacuum cleaner" is sucking in water from the funnel and discharging it into a triangular separation chamber. Mixture of water and oil from the "wet vac" goes into the sideward corner of the triangle. The top corner of the triangle vents gas to the atmospherre. The bottom corner of the triangle dumps water back into the ocean. Midway along the vertical edge between gas-vent and water-dump corners, oil (lighter than water but heavier than any gas) is pumped out to an overboard plastic jug. (Plastic containers are used to sell motor oil, so plastic dissolving in the oil won't be a problem if the same kind of plastic is used.) When the overboard jug gets full, the "wet vac" is turned off, the top of the jug is sealed, the jug is set adrift in the ocean, a new jug is connected to the oil-from-middle tube, and then the "wet vac" is turned back on.
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Update 2010.May.25: NBC evening news interviewed John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil, where he suggested using basically a scaled-up version of my idea, a method that was used to clean up most of a huge oil spill off the coast of Saudi Arabia in 1993: Use several supertankers to directly suck off the surface oil+water mixture, don't bother to separate it right away, just store the mixture in the tanker until it's full, then travel to shore and pump the load of oil+water mixture to a facility on schore where the oil and water can be separated later. (The air portion is vented immediately as it simply escapes from the top of the tanker's storage capacity.) Note that the spill has grown so large during this month that my small-scale idea from a month ago may no longer be sufficient, and I really like the proposed supertanker idea now.
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Immediately after seeing that interview, I conducted a Google search and found this additional information:
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2010.May.13:
fastcompany.com (by Ariel Schwartz: Idea by John Hofmeister and Nick Pozzi)
esquire.com (by Mark Warren: Nick Pozzi was in part of team to clean up Saudi spills in 1993-94; Jon King is his business partner now; "with the right calls, tankers could be on the scene in 2 days")
blogdig.net
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2010.May.14:
whywehatetheoilcompanies.com (A Word from John Hofmeister)
aolnews.com (by Chanan Tigay)
inhabitat.com (by Brit Liggett)
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2010.May.21:
evans-politics.com (Daily Kos, by Badabing)
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2010.May.24:
culturemap.com (by Shelby Hodge: John Hofmeister book etc.)
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Current blog:
huffingtonpost.com
2010.May.07-08: BP lowered a "dome" over one of the leaks, but methane hydrate crystals floated to the top of the inside of the dome where the exhaust tube is connected, clogging it. The same day this problem was announced, I conceived two ideas for combatting the problem, and called Anna Eshoo at the first opportunity.
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My first idea was to build a simple reverse-flow heat exchanger with a combustion chamber attached to the top, coupled to a pump, to suck off some of the methane hydrate and oil mixture, burn it, and release the warm exhaust gasses back into the inside of the "dome", thus removing some of the methane while simultaeously heating the mix to a temperature where methane doesn't form hydrate crystals but instead simply flows freely up the tube. The warm CO2 bubbling up through the tube would force more rapid rise of the mix through the tube to the surface, and the turbulence generated by the rising CO2 bubbles would break up any crystals that formed inside the tube. Furthermore, rising CO2 would transfer heat to the rising oil mix, warming it all the way up from the depths until the pressure was low enough that methane would bubble out rather than form hydrates. The depressurized methane would then "explode" upward, but because the top of the tube is open at the surface, no pressure would build up, so there'd be no repeat of the original explosion that broke through pressure-holdback seals.
MORE DETAILS AVAILABLE IF ANYONE ASKS.
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My second idea depends on the current state of biotechnology: If there is any industrial organic-catalyst (enzyme) that catalyzes the reaction between some oxidizing agent (such as hydrogen peroxide) and methane, allowing rapid "burning" of methane even at four degrees above water-freezing (the uniform temperature in the depths of the ocean), then I propose to release a mix of the enzyme and the oxidizing agent, from pressurized tanks, directly into the oil+hydrate mix inside the dome. As with the combustion chamber with hozes and pump, the amount of methane would be reduced and the heat of combustion would melt the hydrate crystals etc. This would be much easier to deploy, requiring only remote control over the valves controlling release of the chemicals, no need for pumps or ignition-startup etc. But I don't know whether any such low-temperature methane-oxidation catalysts are currently available industrially. I contacted the bio-engineering department at Stanford to ask somebody there to get back in contact with me, but nobody responded.
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