- Email: [email protected]
Operation clean-up
Operation clean-up Finding a better way to suck spilled oil from the ocean is a goal worth $1 million. Dana MacKenzie reports
Ben lowt / getty
I
T’S A sunny September afternoon on the New Jersey shore, a few days after hurricane Irene blew through, and I am standing atop a tower and looking across Raritan bay. In the distance, I can faintly make out the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Three storeys below is an enormous pool filled with what looks like melted chocolate. The whine of high-speed pumps fills the air as a contraption called the Current Buster pushes its yellow, V-shaped maw though the gooey brown, leaving, in its wake, a ribbon of clear, sparkling blue. But this isn’t Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory I’m visiting. The brown liquid swirling below is actually a layer of 130,000 litres of oil floating on water in the Oil and Hazardous Materials Simulated Environmental Test Tank. About the length of four Olympic swimming pools, OHMSETT is the world’s largest wave
46 | NewScientist | 29 October 2011
tank devoted to testing oil-spill response. You remember oil spills. They were all over the news last year, when the blowout of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 of its crew and went on to spew more than 780 million litres of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. For BP, the spill was an 87-day public relations debacle. After the well was finally capped on 15 July 2010, and the surface signs of the spill disappeared, the issue itself seemed to disappear from public awareness. The oil spill problem didn’t go away, however, as the recent grounding of the cargo ship Rena off the coast of Tauranga, New Zealand, illustrates. Every year, an estimated 760 million litres of humanproduced oil fouls the world’s oceans. That’s one Deepwater Horizon every year. This vast amount stealthily builds up from smaller
spills that never make the headlines, as well as from everyday activities: people riding jet skis or motorboats, or ships dumping bilge oil at sea (see diagram, page 48). And it’s not just the oceans that are affected. One hundred oil spills occur in the US every day, roughly threequarters on land and the rest in water. In July this year, for instance, the rupture of an Exxon pipeline below the Yellowstone river emptied 160,000 litres of oil into the water. To the average person, the clean-up efforts in the wake of oil spills and blowouts can seem endless and often hopeless. Wendy Schmidt is not the average person, however. She had the resources to do something about it. Schmidt, who is married to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has a track record of supporting clean energy causes through the Schmidt Family Foundation. When the X Prize
Foundation – the sponsor of other megaprizes such as the Google Lunar X Prize, for the first privately funded moonshot – proposed a competition to develop better oil clean-up systems, Schmidt says, “I leapt at the chance.” And so, two weeks after BP capped its well, the X Prize Foundation announced the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. On 11 October this year it awarded $1 million to the developer of the best-performing oil-removal system and $300,000 to the second-place finisher. But simply being invited to compete was a
”Every year, an estimated 760 million litres of oil – one Deepwater Horizon – foul the world’s oceans”
kind of victory. When the prize was announced, 350 teams registered their interest and 37 formally entered the challenge. A mere 10 were chosen to travel to New Jersey to showcase their radical new designs. If you’re wondering why we need a better way to clean up oil spills, look no further than what happened in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico spill. In the race to clean up as much of the oil as quickly as possible, several different methods were employed. According to a study by the US Department of the Interior (DoI), about 5 per cent of the oil was burned, a solution with obvious environmental drawbacks. Another 8 per cent was dispersed chemically – broken up into tinier droplets – which has less overt downsides. “People in the oil industry think that dispersants were a success because they kept those oil-covered birds and turtles off the
front page,” says Eric Hoek, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. Environmentalists, however, don’t share that rosy viewpoint. “People debate whether the dispersants are toxic, but I’m not even sure whether it matters,” says Hoek. In breaking up the oil, dispersants also make it easier for marine creatures to ingest while not altering the toxic chemicals in the oil itself. So while the use of dispersants reduced the number of oil-soaked birds, the long-term effect on wildlife will not be known for years. The most environmentally benign solution – mechanical removal – came out of the Gulf spill looking like a loser. Though 830 skimming boats were deployed, they only managed to remove only 3 per cent of the total spill, according to a DoI estimate. The trouble is that neither skimmers nor 29 October 2011 | NewScientist | 47
booms have seen much in the way of tonnes of plastic trash that has accumulated technological advances. Booms are like fences in the Pacific due to tidal flows. His prototype placed around an oil spill that absorb the oil off solution was designed as a “vacuum cleaner the water. But they can be a clumsy fix, because for the ocean,” he says. in all but the stillest water, currents allow After the Deepwater Horizon spill, Day much of the oil to escape under the boom. and his friend Fred Giovannitti, a tattoo artist, As long as dispersants look like the best adapted the blueprints for the ocean vacuum option and mechanical recovery looks like the cleaner to make it suck up oil instead of worst, there will be no incentive to invest in plastic. Christening it the Emergency improving mechanical recovery, says Merv Extraction Line, they took Giovannitti’s Fingas, an oil-spill scientist who was once the drawings to an engineer to convert them into chief of the Emergencies Science Division of three-dimensional computer models and then Environment Canada. “We have too many into prototypes. They built the EEL in Day’s organisations chasing the magic dream of garage and tested it in his swimming pool, dropping something in the water that makes using food dye instead of crude. the oil go away,” he says. “Let’s get out the pumps and booms and the things that work.” ”Too many chase the magic Schmidt’s prize went further, encouraging dream of dropping radical redesigns of these mechanical solutions that would be capable of clearing something in the water at least 2500 gallons (9500 litres) of oil per that makes the oil go away” minute. According to Peter Velez of Shell International, who developed the rules for the competition, that target was chosen For a year, Day’s team worked without pay, because it is more than twice the rate at which burning through half a million dollars of his existing commercially available systems can own money. A week before shipping the skim oil off the water. Each of the finalists – system to OHMSETT, they put it into the ocean five companies from the US and five from for the first time, at Long Beach Harbor in Europe – was invited to OHMSETT for one California. “You need permits to do that, but week to try to meet that goal. I didn’t have time,” says Day. The harbour No competitor had a more unlikely journey patrol and police quickly showed up to shut to the X Challenge finals than Ashley Day, the them down, but when Day explained what founder of Vor-Tek Recovery Solutions, based he was doing, he says, their tone suddenly in Fullerton, California. Day is not an engineer changed. About 80 per cent of tanker oil spills by training – he has a degree in business and are under 7600 litres (2000 gallons), a figure played professional basketball, including a the International Tanker Owners Pollution stint with the Magic Johnson All-Stars touring Federation deems a “small” spill. Most of team. After quitting basketball he started a these occur in harbours, ports and marinas, scrap-metal recycling business, but dreamed where the local authorities are often left to of something much bigger. He wanted to build clean up the mess as best they can. “They a system for cleaning up the Great Pacific ended up being my greatest fans,” Day says. Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of millions of “They said, ‘you’re actually giving us
something we can use’.” After that experience, though he had not yet pumped even a drop of oil, Day went to New Jersey full of optimism. After all, the EEL offered a number of innovations unlike anything available on the market. Unlike regular booms, which passively corral the oil, the EEL sucks the oil toward it. It also solves the problem of how oil escapes from conventional booms. “For them, if the oil is a single inch underneath the water’s surface, it’s gone,” says Day. So unlike a regular boom, the EEL extends 1.2 metres below the surface to trap oil that would simply slide under traditional floats. Computer models had led Day to believe that the EEL could extract 19,000 litres of oil per minute, twice the minimum amount to make it eligible for one of the prizes. Sure enough, during the practice runs, the machine caused observers’ jaws to hit the floor by pumping up to 13,600 litres per minute, filling the facility’s eight 2300-litre collection tanks to the brim in just over a minute. But the official runs proved tough. Though the EEL would have finished in second place in calm water, it fared poorly in rougher conditions. Day’s group wasn’t the only one to suffer – only two teams, both industry stalwarts, managed to exceed the target, prompting the X-Prize Foundation not to award the $100,000 third prize (see chart, right). In the end, experience won out. Elastec, an Illinois-based company with a 30-year track record in cleaning up spills, won the $1 million first prize with a system that scooped up 17,700 litres per minute, more than three times the previous commercial record. Elastec had played a big role in the Gulf clean-up. However, the system the company developed for the X challenge was a revolutionary improvement over their previous designs. Its V-shaped boom, a common theme among the
Oil on troubled waters Disasters get the attention, but they account for just a small fraction of the oil that seeps into the seas every year, mostly from sources that go unreported
Routine maintenance:
Total spillage from tankers
518 million litres
6717 million litres (1970-2010)
Deepwater Horizon
779 million litres (2010)
Rena tanker (maximum capacity) 1.99 million litres (2011)
Every year, routine ship operations like bilge cleaning release millions of gallons of oil into ports and oceans
SOURCE: OCEAN PLANET (1995 REPORT), INTERNATIONAL TANKER OWNERS POLLUTION FEDERATION LTD (ITOPF)
48 | NewScientist | 29 October 2011
Exxon Valdez
43.5 million litres (1989)
Hard target The X Challenge target of clearing 9463 litres (2500 US galllons) of oil per minute at 70% efficiency is more than twice what commercial systems can siphon. Ten teams competed but only two met the goal 20,000
FIRST PRIZE Elastec $1 million SECOND PRIZE Nofi $300,000
15,000
NOFI
10,000
Vor-Tek KOSEQ
5000
Voraxial 0
Amount of oil pumped in relation to water
89.5%
83%
finalists, funnelled the oil into four banks of rapidly rotating drums. Second prize went to Nofi, a Norwegian maritime technology corporation whose Current Buster was the only other contender to exceed the contest’s target of 9500 litres per minute. They achieved this result in spite of hurricane Irene, which knocked out power to OHMSETT for four days and compressed their five-day set-up and testing schedule into a gruelling two days.
Viable technologies The competition has attracted interest from the oil industry. Shell, which co-sponsored it, paid a large part of its operating expenses and has pledged to help teams bring the winning ideas to market. Several industry experts served as judges, affording them an up-close look at the new technologies. Schmidt is excited about the results her prize has brought in. “Within 15 months of pressing the ‘Go’ button, we have several viable, scalable technologies,” she says. “For me, as a philanthropist, that’s a powerful return.” Promising as they are, however, these new technologies face a few obstacles before they can make a difference in the real world. The first problem is that it is not the oil companies, for the most part, that buy clean-up technology. Instead, they hire independent contractors, known as oil-spill response organisations, as a sort of janitorial service to clean up their messes. These companies are paid by the hour, so they have little incentive
57.3%
87.9%
49.2%
SOURCE: X PRIZE FOUNDATION
RECOVERY EFFICIENCY
to deploy the quickest and most efficient clean-up technology, unless the oil companies demand it. With governments around the world seemingly indifferent to regulation, oil companies hypnotised by dispersants and market forces not exactly working in their favour, the finalists might face an uphill battle. But government intervention is not out of the question. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 led to the US Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990, which dramatically reduced the number and severity of spills from oil tankers in American waters by requiring, among other things, that tankers have a double-hulled construction. Though the vastly larger Deepwater Horizon disaster has not generated any comparable government regulation, it may yet do so. “OPA 1990 needs to be revisited
and needs to become OPA 2012,” says James Bonner, an oil-spill researcher at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. That might mean changes as simple as forcing every tanker to include a mechanical oil collector like those at the X Challenge. To make this work, the clean-up machines would need to generate money for the oil companies. That’s easy. Once recovered, the oil can either be sold back to the oil companies for refining, or to the asphalt or roofing sectors, which have many lower-grade commercial uses for reclaimed oil. And though the contest was judged on speed, it catalysed innovations in other areas. It led Enviro Voraxial, a company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to develop a machine that is far smaller than any other mechanical clearance system. Based on NASA gyroscope technology, their design also works faster than anything on the market today – as do the majority of the systems that did not meet the competition’s target. Much more importantly, the Voraxial separator is so portable that it can easily be flown or trucked into tricky sites such as that of the Yellowstone spill. The machine can also easily be stored on oil platforms, ships, or in mines or factories to provide crucial first response to oil spills. Tantalisingly, both Voraxial and Vor-Tek’s devices can also remove ballast water, contaminated mine water or fracking fluid – oil is not the only pollutant we dump into the world’s water. The more experienced teams took home the prizes, but for Day, the chance to have his design vindicated at OHMSETT gave him something money couldn’t buy: a foot in the door. “We could never get our idea in front of anybody,” he says. “The X Prize gave us that chance.” n Dana Mackenzie is a science writer based in Santa Cruz, California
Elastec’s V-shaped boom design scooped first prize
Elastec
Oil recovery rate (litres/min)
ELASTEC
29 October 2011 | NewScientist | 49
Ben lowt / getty
I
T’S A sunny September afternoon on the New Jersey shore, a few days after hurricane Irene blew through, and I am standing atop a tower and looking across Raritan bay. In the distance, I can faintly make out the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Three storeys below is an enormous pool filled with what looks like melted chocolate. The whine of high-speed pumps fills the air as a contraption called the Current Buster pushes its yellow, V-shaped maw though the gooey brown, leaving, in its wake, a ribbon of clear, sparkling blue. But this isn’t Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory I’m visiting. The brown liquid swirling below is actually a layer of 130,000 litres of oil floating on water in the Oil and Hazardous Materials Simulated Environmental Test Tank. About the length of four Olympic swimming pools, OHMSETT is the world’s largest wave
46 | NewScientist | 29 October 2011
tank devoted to testing oil-spill response. You remember oil spills. They were all over the news last year, when the blowout of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 of its crew and went on to spew more than 780 million litres of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. For BP, the spill was an 87-day public relations debacle. After the well was finally capped on 15 July 2010, and the surface signs of the spill disappeared, the issue itself seemed to disappear from public awareness. The oil spill problem didn’t go away, however, as the recent grounding of the cargo ship Rena off the coast of Tauranga, New Zealand, illustrates. Every year, an estimated 760 million litres of humanproduced oil fouls the world’s oceans. That’s one Deepwater Horizon every year. This vast amount stealthily builds up from smaller
spills that never make the headlines, as well as from everyday activities: people riding jet skis or motorboats, or ships dumping bilge oil at sea (see diagram, page 48). And it’s not just the oceans that are affected. One hundred oil spills occur in the US every day, roughly threequarters on land and the rest in water. In July this year, for instance, the rupture of an Exxon pipeline below the Yellowstone river emptied 160,000 litres of oil into the water. To the average person, the clean-up efforts in the wake of oil spills and blowouts can seem endless and often hopeless. Wendy Schmidt is not the average person, however. She had the resources to do something about it. Schmidt, who is married to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has a track record of supporting clean energy causes through the Schmidt Family Foundation. When the X Prize
Foundation – the sponsor of other megaprizes such as the Google Lunar X Prize, for the first privately funded moonshot – proposed a competition to develop better oil clean-up systems, Schmidt says, “I leapt at the chance.” And so, two weeks after BP capped its well, the X Prize Foundation announced the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. On 11 October this year it awarded $1 million to the developer of the best-performing oil-removal system and $300,000 to the second-place finisher. But simply being invited to compete was a
”Every year, an estimated 760 million litres of oil – one Deepwater Horizon – foul the world’s oceans”
kind of victory. When the prize was announced, 350 teams registered their interest and 37 formally entered the challenge. A mere 10 were chosen to travel to New Jersey to showcase their radical new designs. If you’re wondering why we need a better way to clean up oil spills, look no further than what happened in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico spill. In the race to clean up as much of the oil as quickly as possible, several different methods were employed. According to a study by the US Department of the Interior (DoI), about 5 per cent of the oil was burned, a solution with obvious environmental drawbacks. Another 8 per cent was dispersed chemically – broken up into tinier droplets – which has less overt downsides. “People in the oil industry think that dispersants were a success because they kept those oil-covered birds and turtles off the
front page,” says Eric Hoek, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. Environmentalists, however, don’t share that rosy viewpoint. “People debate whether the dispersants are toxic, but I’m not even sure whether it matters,” says Hoek. In breaking up the oil, dispersants also make it easier for marine creatures to ingest while not altering the toxic chemicals in the oil itself. So while the use of dispersants reduced the number of oil-soaked birds, the long-term effect on wildlife will not be known for years. The most environmentally benign solution – mechanical removal – came out of the Gulf spill looking like a loser. Though 830 skimming boats were deployed, they only managed to remove only 3 per cent of the total spill, according to a DoI estimate. The trouble is that neither skimmers nor 29 October 2011 | NewScientist | 47
booms have seen much in the way of tonnes of plastic trash that has accumulated technological advances. Booms are like fences in the Pacific due to tidal flows. His prototype placed around an oil spill that absorb the oil off solution was designed as a “vacuum cleaner the water. But they can be a clumsy fix, because for the ocean,” he says. in all but the stillest water, currents allow After the Deepwater Horizon spill, Day much of the oil to escape under the boom. and his friend Fred Giovannitti, a tattoo artist, As long as dispersants look like the best adapted the blueprints for the ocean vacuum option and mechanical recovery looks like the cleaner to make it suck up oil instead of worst, there will be no incentive to invest in plastic. Christening it the Emergency improving mechanical recovery, says Merv Extraction Line, they took Giovannitti’s Fingas, an oil-spill scientist who was once the drawings to an engineer to convert them into chief of the Emergencies Science Division of three-dimensional computer models and then Environment Canada. “We have too many into prototypes. They built the EEL in Day’s organisations chasing the magic dream of garage and tested it in his swimming pool, dropping something in the water that makes using food dye instead of crude. the oil go away,” he says. “Let’s get out the pumps and booms and the things that work.” ”Too many chase the magic Schmidt’s prize went further, encouraging dream of dropping radical redesigns of these mechanical solutions that would be capable of clearing something in the water at least 2500 gallons (9500 litres) of oil per that makes the oil go away” minute. According to Peter Velez of Shell International, who developed the rules for the competition, that target was chosen For a year, Day’s team worked without pay, because it is more than twice the rate at which burning through half a million dollars of his existing commercially available systems can own money. A week before shipping the skim oil off the water. Each of the finalists – system to OHMSETT, they put it into the ocean five companies from the US and five from for the first time, at Long Beach Harbor in Europe – was invited to OHMSETT for one California. “You need permits to do that, but week to try to meet that goal. I didn’t have time,” says Day. The harbour No competitor had a more unlikely journey patrol and police quickly showed up to shut to the X Challenge finals than Ashley Day, the them down, but when Day explained what founder of Vor-Tek Recovery Solutions, based he was doing, he says, their tone suddenly in Fullerton, California. Day is not an engineer changed. About 80 per cent of tanker oil spills by training – he has a degree in business and are under 7600 litres (2000 gallons), a figure played professional basketball, including a the International Tanker Owners Pollution stint with the Magic Johnson All-Stars touring Federation deems a “small” spill. Most of team. After quitting basketball he started a these occur in harbours, ports and marinas, scrap-metal recycling business, but dreamed where the local authorities are often left to of something much bigger. He wanted to build clean up the mess as best they can. “They a system for cleaning up the Great Pacific ended up being my greatest fans,” Day says. Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of millions of “They said, ‘you’re actually giving us
something we can use’.” After that experience, though he had not yet pumped even a drop of oil, Day went to New Jersey full of optimism. After all, the EEL offered a number of innovations unlike anything available on the market. Unlike regular booms, which passively corral the oil, the EEL sucks the oil toward it. It also solves the problem of how oil escapes from conventional booms. “For them, if the oil is a single inch underneath the water’s surface, it’s gone,” says Day. So unlike a regular boom, the EEL extends 1.2 metres below the surface to trap oil that would simply slide under traditional floats. Computer models had led Day to believe that the EEL could extract 19,000 litres of oil per minute, twice the minimum amount to make it eligible for one of the prizes. Sure enough, during the practice runs, the machine caused observers’ jaws to hit the floor by pumping up to 13,600 litres per minute, filling the facility’s eight 2300-litre collection tanks to the brim in just over a minute. But the official runs proved tough. Though the EEL would have finished in second place in calm water, it fared poorly in rougher conditions. Day’s group wasn’t the only one to suffer – only two teams, both industry stalwarts, managed to exceed the target, prompting the X-Prize Foundation not to award the $100,000 third prize (see chart, right). In the end, experience won out. Elastec, an Illinois-based company with a 30-year track record in cleaning up spills, won the $1 million first prize with a system that scooped up 17,700 litres per minute, more than three times the previous commercial record. Elastec had played a big role in the Gulf clean-up. However, the system the company developed for the X challenge was a revolutionary improvement over their previous designs. Its V-shaped boom, a common theme among the
Oil on troubled waters Disasters get the attention, but they account for just a small fraction of the oil that seeps into the seas every year, mostly from sources that go unreported
Routine maintenance:
Total spillage from tankers
518 million litres
6717 million litres (1970-2010)
Deepwater Horizon
779 million litres (2010)
Rena tanker (maximum capacity) 1.99 million litres (2011)
Every year, routine ship operations like bilge cleaning release millions of gallons of oil into ports and oceans
SOURCE: OCEAN PLANET (1995 REPORT), INTERNATIONAL TANKER OWNERS POLLUTION FEDERATION LTD (ITOPF)
48 | NewScientist | 29 October 2011
Exxon Valdez
43.5 million litres (1989)
Hard target The X Challenge target of clearing 9463 litres (2500 US galllons) of oil per minute at 70% efficiency is more than twice what commercial systems can siphon. Ten teams competed but only two met the goal 20,000
FIRST PRIZE Elastec $1 million SECOND PRIZE Nofi $300,000
15,000
NOFI
10,000
Vor-Tek KOSEQ
5000
Voraxial 0
Amount of oil pumped in relation to water
89.5%
83%
finalists, funnelled the oil into four banks of rapidly rotating drums. Second prize went to Nofi, a Norwegian maritime technology corporation whose Current Buster was the only other contender to exceed the contest’s target of 9500 litres per minute. They achieved this result in spite of hurricane Irene, which knocked out power to OHMSETT for four days and compressed their five-day set-up and testing schedule into a gruelling two days.
Viable technologies The competition has attracted interest from the oil industry. Shell, which co-sponsored it, paid a large part of its operating expenses and has pledged to help teams bring the winning ideas to market. Several industry experts served as judges, affording them an up-close look at the new technologies. Schmidt is excited about the results her prize has brought in. “Within 15 months of pressing the ‘Go’ button, we have several viable, scalable technologies,” she says. “For me, as a philanthropist, that’s a powerful return.” Promising as they are, however, these new technologies face a few obstacles before they can make a difference in the real world. The first problem is that it is not the oil companies, for the most part, that buy clean-up technology. Instead, they hire independent contractors, known as oil-spill response organisations, as a sort of janitorial service to clean up their messes. These companies are paid by the hour, so they have little incentive
57.3%
87.9%
49.2%
SOURCE: X PRIZE FOUNDATION
RECOVERY EFFICIENCY
to deploy the quickest and most efficient clean-up technology, unless the oil companies demand it. With governments around the world seemingly indifferent to regulation, oil companies hypnotised by dispersants and market forces not exactly working in their favour, the finalists might face an uphill battle. But government intervention is not out of the question. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 led to the US Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990, which dramatically reduced the number and severity of spills from oil tankers in American waters by requiring, among other things, that tankers have a double-hulled construction. Though the vastly larger Deepwater Horizon disaster has not generated any comparable government regulation, it may yet do so. “OPA 1990 needs to be revisited
and needs to become OPA 2012,” says James Bonner, an oil-spill researcher at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. That might mean changes as simple as forcing every tanker to include a mechanical oil collector like those at the X Challenge. To make this work, the clean-up machines would need to generate money for the oil companies. That’s easy. Once recovered, the oil can either be sold back to the oil companies for refining, or to the asphalt or roofing sectors, which have many lower-grade commercial uses for reclaimed oil. And though the contest was judged on speed, it catalysed innovations in other areas. It led Enviro Voraxial, a company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to develop a machine that is far smaller than any other mechanical clearance system. Based on NASA gyroscope technology, their design also works faster than anything on the market today – as do the majority of the systems that did not meet the competition’s target. Much more importantly, the Voraxial separator is so portable that it can easily be flown or trucked into tricky sites such as that of the Yellowstone spill. The machine can also easily be stored on oil platforms, ships, or in mines or factories to provide crucial first response to oil spills. Tantalisingly, both Voraxial and Vor-Tek’s devices can also remove ballast water, contaminated mine water or fracking fluid – oil is not the only pollutant we dump into the world’s water. The more experienced teams took home the prizes, but for Day, the chance to have his design vindicated at OHMSETT gave him something money couldn’t buy: a foot in the door. “We could never get our idea in front of anybody,” he says. “The X Prize gave us that chance.” n Dana Mackenzie is a science writer based in Santa Cruz, California
Elastec’s V-shaped boom design scooped first prize
Elastec
Oil recovery rate (litres/min)
ELASTEC
29 October 2011 | NewScientist | 49