BP’s oil cleanup website raises 120,000 ideas

Website set up by oil firm to trawl for for fresh ideas

BP has considered more than 120,000 ideas on how to contain and clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, creating a “melting pot” of expertise that is accelerating the development of technology for oil spill containment and environmental restoration, the company said.

A website set up by BP in May to trawl for fresh ideas on how to deal with the Deepwater Horizon disaster – America’s worst pollution incident – received 80,000 entries on the cleanup  and 40,000 on capping the well.

BP has set up the alternative response technology testing group, a 14-strong team which works closely with the US coastguard, to evaluate and test the ideas. The most promising will be developed.

All the ideas, submitted by equipment suppliers and individuals, have been through a four-stage evaluation process. The successful ones are being tested by the group in the Gulf of Mexico to aid rapid development and deployment.

Speaking to PE from the Gulf of Mexico, Cameron Rennie, the BP senior strategy adviser who heads up the technology testing group, said: “We are creating innovative solutions faster by taking ideas from industry experts, environmental specialists and the US coastguard and putting them in this beautiful melting pot of collaboration.

“Things that would have been developed from year-to-year at cleanup and containment conferences are being developed within a much faster timescale.”

The group has tested 41 technologies.

Ideas under evaluation include a botanical photometry system adapted to detect crude oil in the sea; a gasifier for disposing of material contaminated with crude oil; and an oil recovery system that squeezes absorbent booms through a giant mangle and puts them on to a large bobbin adapted from offshore cable-laying for storage.

Rennie said: “The botanical photometry system is used in the orange production industry in Florida to pick up on the early warning signs of stressed trees. While we perceive that a tree looks unhealthy when it is going brown, the infrared system picks that up early.

“A coastguard knew of the system, and thought it might be employed to detect oil.”

The system works by detecting and analysing changes in the light reflected by plant chlorophyll, the pigment responsible for photosynthesis and an indicator of the health of vegetation.

With orange trees, the changes are visible in the near infrared part of the spectrum about two weeks earlier than they show up in visible light.

The BP team will see whether oil affects the health of sargassum seaweed and if the technique could be used to detect submerged oil.

“The website is still open and BP welcomes ideas from any engineers,” said Rennie.
The website can be found at www.horizonedocs.com.