By Jesse Emspak: Subscribe to Jesse's RSS feed
June 11, 2010 3:58 PM EDT
A machine designed to pull oil from the tar sands in Canada has found a new job: cleaning the beaches on the Gulf of Mexico.
Clean Beach Technologies invented the machines, which resemble dump trucks with a lot of plumbing attached. One end is a set of hoppers, which are connected to pumps. One hopper holds a commercial cleaning solution called Petro Clean, which contains bacteria that consume the oil. The others hold the sand.
Water is pumped underneath the hoppers through the pumps, which are called eductors, or jet pumps. Jet pumps are basically T-shaped pipes. Inside the pipe is a nozzle that squeezes the incoming water, increasing the pressure. Another pipe is connected perpendicular to the nozzle. As the liquid passes from the nozzle it creates suction in the pipe connected to its side. Jet pumps are often used to suck up water that has debris in it that could damage moving parts in ordinary pumps, where the water has to pass by an impeller.
Steven Sommers, principal at the Houston-based company, said tar sands and cleaning the beaches presents a similar challenge. "You have the same problem," he said. "You need to separate a hydrocarbon from the sand." The crisis in the gulf prompted the company to submit its idea to BP via the Deepwater Horizon Response page.
The big difference between mining tar sands and cleaning a beach is what you do with the oil and the sand. With the tar sands, the idea is to get the oil out in order to use it, and nobody worries about the sand afterwards. But cleaning a beach requires that the sand be put back in place. That means whatever method is used, it has to comply with both state and Federal environmental regulations. That eliminates some types of cleaning agents, as they would be too toxic.
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Tony Watson, chief executive officer of Clean Beach, said while the principle of jet pump technology is an old one, his company has added some new twists. One is in the pumps. Ordinary eductors have fluid going through a straight, smooth pipe. Clean Beach designed a pump that has canted surfaces inside, to create vortices. Those vortices break up the clumps of oily sand and allow the cleaning solution to come in contact with more of it, allowing the microbes that break down oil to do their work faster.
Another wrinkle is what Watson calls a fast-flow pump, which can not only pull more water at a time through the machines, but also can be deployed below the water line on a beach to provide the seawater used in cleaning the sand.
Clean Beach Technologies system was one of 80,000 submitted to BP Of all those responses, 250 made the cut to be tested in the field, according to BP spokesman Mark Poegler.
A staff of 40 people is assigned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fully 7,000 different proposals got to where the technicians thought they deserved more considerations.
Poegler said that of tens of thousands of responses, about 60% involved plugging the well. The other 40% involved dealing with the oil at the surface.
One of the things that got Clean Beach Technologies the nod was that the company had already built a prototype. "That wasn't inexpensive," Watson said. But the investment paid off, and BP engineers worked with Clean Beach to refine the design for use on the Gulf beaches.
Watson said Clean Beach hasn't stopped with the idea of cleaning the sand. He said he wrote to President Obama, suggesting a fleet of barges be deployed with his company's fast-flow pumps.
Those barges would go out into the gulf and take up the water mixed with the oil, and transfer it to tankers that could take it away to be separated. Watson claims the eight fast-flow pumps on each barge could pull up 120,000 barrels per day. "If we had deployed a system like that much of that oil would never reach the shore," he said.
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