Robin Hood Saves Louisiana
Kevin Costner, yes that Kevin Costner, founded Costner Industries (CINC) in 1993 to find a better way to minimize damage from oil spills.
CINC’s main product is a centrifugal separator that spins fluids very fast, using centrifugal force from the spinning motion to separate oil and water.
Costner’s machines have been used to clean up an oil spill off the coast of Japan and BP is now using them as part of it’s cleanup efforts on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
CINC’s largest extractor, the V20, can process up to 200 gallons per minute (288,000 gallons per day). According to Costner’s testimony before Congress, “Assuming 20 V-20’s had been deployed to the Exxon Valdez in the first few hours of the spill on local fishing boats, 90% of the spill could have been recovered in less than 1 week. CINC is at its best working as a first line of defense, gathering oil before it has a chance to stray far from the initial spill point. The cost of recovering a spill on the ocean is a fraction of the cost of cleaning up tar once it’s made its way to the shore (roughly $5 million for 20 V-20s versus $4 billion for the Exxon Valdez spill).”
One of the largest difficulties faced by Costner Industries has been opposition from the federal government. Approximately 0.1% of the water discharged by the device back into a spill area contains oil. Unfortunately, that does not meet the 15ppm (parts per million) limit established by the EPA. In effect, the EPA regulations define the cleaning device as a polluter, because it discharges water containing a small amount of residual oil back into the environment.
Kevin goes on to discuss how the federal government has blocked progress in oil cleanup technology “… oil spill response teams were bound by various regulatory policies and rules of testing that effectively stonewalled even the possibility of new technologies entering the market. For the purposes of their own protection, these co-ops and companies were not interested in any technology or method of cleanup that had not received the federal stamp of approval. In order to receive approval, technologies must be tested on actual spills, but the agencies charged with approval will not deploy untested equipment in a spill scenario.” It is sad when the so many of our tax dollars are spent preventing progress on environmental issues.
Here is Kevin demonstrating the machine in Louisiana:
