A breakthrough in oil cleanup technology allows crews to skim spilled oil off the water's surface at a much faster rate. The new device wasn't developed by Exxon, BP or any of the major oil companies — it's the work of Elastec/American Marine, based in Illinois. And the design won the company a rich award from the X Prize Foundation.
A breakthrough in oil cleanup technology allows crews to skim spilled oil off the water's surface at a much faster rate. The new device wasn't developed by Exxon, BP or any of the major oil companies — it's the work of Elastec/American Marine, based in Illinois. And the design won the company a rich award from the X Prize Foundation.
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Oil is attracted to plastic. And water is not. That, in essence, is the basis of Elastec's new skimmer.
It's huge, about the size of a large U-Haul truck. And it looks something like a giant abacus. It has 64 grooved plastic discs, arranged in rows, with a scraper along the top.
"That's the elegance of this machine. It sounds like it's just so basic, but it picks the oil off, puts it in a trough and we pump it away, and that's all there is to it," says Team Elastec project manager Don Johnson. "And it does it at a nearly 90 percent efficiency rate."
Elastec was inspired by a gauntlet thrown down by the X Prize Foundation, which organizes privately funded competitions to spur technological advancement. It's known for awarding a $10 million prize in 2004 to build a privately funded spacecraft.
Funded by activist Wendy Schmidt, who is married to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the Oil Cleanup X Challenge dangled a million-dollar purse to any company that could drastically increase the speed that oil is skimmed from water.
The industry standard is for oil skimmers to remove 1,100 gallons of oil per minute. The X Challenge set the bar at 2,500 gallons per minute.
Article continues: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141481055/revolutionary-oil-skimmer-nets-1-million-x-prize?ft=1&f=1025
Image credit: Elastec/American Marine
