
Pitt professor wants BP to try his filter - georgecmu
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10159/1063993-53.stm
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ck2
Yeah they filed his idea right in the circular file with all the 7000 per week
others.

If corporations have learned anything in the past few decades, it's to allow
the public to vent all they want and just nod their heads meaninglessly.

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thwarted
There's a tremendous opportunity being missed here. What someone should do is
start giving away empty oil barrels and offer some price for them returned
filled with oil, a price determined by how difficult it will be to then refine
and make use of the collected oil (someone could just scoop up the oil off the
beach, but then the sand suspended in it makes it difficult to do anything
with). Let the public put their ideas to work to get things cleaned up.
Everyone is looking for a silver bullet, a single solution to instantly clean
it all up, which is unobtainable.

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tlack
That would be interesting: if the govt required BP to "buy back" any oil the
public can bring in, if it was easily tested to be of whatever quality, such
as 50% oil:water mix. Let the public clean it up at ~$50/barrel - it's at
$71/barrel now. It would be worth it for most people with a boat and probably
higher revenue per hour than fishing.

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jws
To work the price would have to be many times the market rate to reflect the
difficulty in gathering it. Then people would just cheat and just adulterate
virgin crude.

A barrel of oil is ~250 pounds. That's a bit of a beast to haul around for
$50. You'd probably be better off gathering aluminum cans off the side of a
highway at at $0.40/pound than oil at $0.20/pound. Might I suggest eastern
Washington state? The two lane highways out there are the most littered I've
seen anywhere in the nation. Good pickings.

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thwarted
Paying market rates, prorated for purity, would be the best thing, actually.
It's in the collectors' best interest to come up with efficient collection
methods to increase the margin between the cost to collect and the payout.

It could be like a black gold, Texas tea, rush.

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eru
But you can already get paid market rates. That's why they are called market
rates. (Though maybe not at a scale of single-digit number of barrels.)

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thwarted
Well, that's the opportunity -- you can't sell crude oil to just anyone, and
most likely no one will buy crude that these kinds of small scales, so a bunch
of smaller sellers get locked out of the market. A refinery has the process
and equipment, but not the crude. And the purchaser potentially pays less than
market rates based on difficulty of preparing the crude for refining if it
isn't as pure as market rate oil is (because it contains sand, water, other
ocean debris). People with ideas on how to clean it up get a chance to try out
their ideas, with a possible payout to boot, without having to wait for Big
Oil to get around to trying them.

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obsaysditto
Shouldn't the main focus be on stopping the source. The rate of oil flowing
out is far more than what can be collected from separation techniques. The
USCG is already using cutters equipped with skimming booms to essential vacuum
up the oil and store it.

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georgecmu
The problem is that large quantities of oil have already dispersed over large
areas of the gulf. Skimming booms don't scale very well, while a lot of these
cotton filters could be created and dispatched very quickly.

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mbreese
I kinda hate to say it, but isn't it a bit late to try and push a new
technique to mass production? This is the type of thing that should have been
done _last year_. I'm sure this is a good technique, and it might just be the
best method for cleaning up the oil that is present in the water. However,
it's one thing to do this in the lab or in a small scale. It's a whole other
issue to do this at the scale of the Gulf.

That being said: I'm pretty sure his funding chances have increased. Perhaps
the oil companies will start (or be forced into) spending more of their money
funding this type of work now.

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Groxx
... and the possible damage to the ecosystem if some of those "chemicals"
leech off? Some things are worse than oil.

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jrockway
Like dispersant.

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Groxx
Yeah, I still don't like the sound of the dispersants. Hiding the problem
apparently makes it go away?

