the biggest spills in the world – when iraq destroyed the kuwaiti oil wells, the current one, ixtoc 1, exxon valdez. ixtoc 1 actually was in the gulf of mexico, too. it took about 8 months to stop the leak. the leak stopped when the finished they side wells. maybe that will be the solution to the current problem?
if you just watched the preceding video, the newswoman states that the oil company is using old technologies and no new technologies have been developed/used. i believe the new technology is the oil/water separator. i’m sure it has always been around but currently companies, such as evtn have technology that will filter up to 3600 gallons of oily water per minute.
according to wikipedia the current rate of the spill is about 2,000,000 gallons per day. and current total hovers about 120,000,000 gallons. according to the epa, there are 643 quadrillion gallons of water in the gulf of mexico. the gulf covers about 600,000 square miles. the closed area of u.s.a waters is 78,597 square miles, according to deepwaterresponse.com. average depth of gulf is 1,615 meters or about a mile deep. so here’s some math:
percent of gulf covered (potentially)= 13% = 78,597/600,000
average depth of water affected (guestimate) = 30 meters
percent of depth affected = 2% = 30/1615
amount of water affected = 167 trillion gallons =167,180,000,000,000= 643,000,000,000,000,000 x 2% x 13%
so to filter the water with a vortex separator at 3600 gallons per minute or 5.2 million a day, you would need 1000 working for 33,000 days. say most of the oil only mixed with the top 1 meter of water due to the fact that it floats – it would take about 1100 days.
but not counting underwater pockets and streams, most of the oil could be on the surface, in the top 10 centimeters. in that case, it would take 100 days to clean the area. this sounds about right. i think it would be better to protect the area closer to the coastline first.
but maybe it would be more harmful to filter the water, you would probably kill a lot of algae and bacteria. the downsides may outweigh the benefits. also remember you would potential need 1000 boats working for 100 days. the current payment rate for a small boat is about $200, so the cost wouldn’t be more than $20-100 million for the boats and then having to buy the vortex and fuel them. even if each vortex cost $1 million dollars, the whole project would cost under $2 billion. in the grand scheme of things not that much, considering the government would recover a large chunk in taxes.
the 1000 boats would each have to cover about a square mile a day to cover the entire 78,597 square miles.