Pitt professor wants BP to try his filter | Hacker News Reader

Pitt professor wants BP to try his filter

post-gazette.com

30 pointsgeorgecmu15 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

There doesn't have to be just one main focus. Different groups can work on different things.

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.

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

Like dispersant.

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

Except that the dispersant /necessarily/ makes it way into the water. Because they put it there.

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