Two farmers find "old school" way to remove oil from water

At first I thought this was a joke. but it looks better than anything BP has come up with thus far. Check it out

http://www.wimp.com/solutionoil/

let's just bitch bitch bitch, instead.

This has been posted a couple of times. Doesn't get much play.

after we stop the spill and clean it up, then we can devote our energy to the blame game.

So what soaks up the other crap their pumping to disperse the oil?

it's not a selective sorbent. It will be useless in a marine oil spill.

There's an entire industry which has conducted research into the best methods to clean oil from water. Two yokels with a bale of hay are not introducing a fantastic new solution.

Sid

both oil and hay float. yes some water is absorbed but if you watch the video closely there is virtually zero oil in the pot after he removes the hay, and the water level is almost the same as when he started. i would guess from observing the oil that if they analyzed the hay after they remove it, there is much more oil than water on it. oil sticks to the hay and it repells water. it appears from the video that oil wins the race to stick to the hay.

to select oil from water, you need a selective sorbent. Otherwise, all you're doing is trying to soak up the entire Gulf of Mexico.

Sid

Donations have been overwhelming. Hanes even donated 50,000 pairs of pantyhose to the cause (which are stuffed with the donated hair). Those and oil eating fungi were used sucessfully in Cosco Busan oil spill of 2007.

http://www.matteroftrust.org/programs/hairmatsinfo.html

However BP engineers have nixed it, saying commercial sorbent booms collect more hair and less water than hair booms.
That's why wet hair is never oily? Well they might be better but obviously BP isn't getting all the oil right now and they are rejecting the hundreds of thousands of pounds of mats sent? Hope others get to them because it can't hurt, especially closer to shore where it would be easy to gather up the filled mats if they sank.

Hair, like hay, will sorb water and oil. If it doesn't sorb water, it doesn't get wet.

Sid

Seriously, though, I don't expect everyone to know about oil spill cleanup technology. The info is certainly out there. As you say, it's going to take lots more than a bunch of straw to handle this spill.

It's been used successfully for at least half a century to remove oil from the surface.

It is cheap, it is plentiful, and it can be done quickly, but of course nobody going to make a billion off this so it can't be good.

because some dude in overalls showed it to you?

From your OP.

But neither is there any automatic *extra* expertise or wisdom from simply being born to a family that lives in the rurals.


And I damn sure wish America in general would get over that particular illusion.

and simple and less expensive.


Seriously, I have no idea if this would work, but it sure looks like it has merit.

Hope it catches hold.

there's nothing wrong with it, and there are many ways to adsorb crude from water. Human hair works very well, as does peat moss and a lot of other things. It is the logistics that are the issue, along with the fact that there are millions and millions of gallons that need to be sopped up. Also, there are underwater plumes of oil that can't be reached with adsorbents.

It's one method for cleaning up oil on water, and I'm sure it will be used, in one form or another, but harvesting the straw, shipping it to where it will be used, transporting it across the water to where the oil is, collecting the material once it has captured the oil, and disposing of it in a safe way all have to be considered. It's nothing that can be utilized quickly.

But, it's a good idea and something like it will be in use.

N.B.: the word is adsorbent, not absorbent. The oil adheres to the surface of the material, rather than being absorbed by it. It's a technical difference, but "adsorption" is the process. Just to be accurate as we discuss it.

especially the correction on adsorbent vs absorbent. There's only one true absorbent that I came across when I was doing spill clean-up. It's a product called Imbiber Beads. Cool stuff, it actually incorporates the liquid right into the structure of the bead, and swells up. You can actually cut a swollen bead in half, and none of the sorbed liquid will be released.

You're wrong about sorbing underwater plumes, btw. We've used meltblown polypropylene to sorb a blob of a very dense hydrocarbon off the bottom of a stream. Can't for the life of me remember the chemical name, now. It was more than 10 years ago. But the polypro doesn't sorb any water at all. Once it's forced down to the bottom of the stream, it's wicks the hydrocarbon and leaves the water behind. We used to do the same demonstration with transmission fluid ('cause it's red) in a clear pyrex dish full of water. If you pour the transmission fluid in from a height, it will go through the water and some will stick to the bottom of the dish. We then forced an polypro pad through the water and cleaned the transmission fluid right off the bottom of the dish. If the anchor pulley on a rope mop skimmer was below (or in) the plume, below the surface of the water, the polypro rope would grab underwater oil without grabbing (much) water, it would then be wrung out and dragged through the plume again.

For shoreline stuff, creeks and rivers that we dealt with, we used loose dried sphagnum peat moss.

:hi:

Sid

just a general knowledge. I imagine just about everything that is out there will be used on this, where it's appropriate.

Now, I can see the guys with the straw actually being useful, especially in narrow backwaters. As a manually-applied material, it could certainly be used for spot cleaning in places where equipment can't go without causing a lot of damage. There is always work for handcrews in these cleanups.

I guess it's very difficult for people to conceptualize the extent of the problem and the size of the contaminated area. Even harder to conceive of how much crude we're actually talking about. So, things like the guys with handfuls of straw make sense if you can't imagine the scale of the disaster.

Let's say, for example, that hay will pick up it's weight in oil. A pound of hay picks up a pound of oil. You'd need ~8 pounds of hay for a gallon of oil.

1,000,000 gallons of oil? 8,000,000 pounds of hay. And then you've got 16 million pounds of oil soaked hay to dispose of.

Sid

hay? Burn it? I don't think so. Bury it? Nah, that won't work, either. On a small scale, it's manageable, but not on the scale of this spill.

It's not a problem with a simple solution, nor even a single solution. The cleanup will take vast resources and a very long time. More's the pity.

one of scale. The guy poured a couple of ounces of oil in that pan...a very far cry from a barrel much less 5000 a day. There isn't enough hay on the planet to grab onto that much oil. But they have a business plan, as the older guy said right at the beginning...they want a contract to do it.

to try things like this instead of dismissing them out of hand

Adsorbents of all sorts are used and are available in the form of mats, tubes, and other forms. It's suitable for some situations and not suitable for others. Where it is suitable, it will be used.

The technology already exists and is in use around the world. The stuff is already on its way. More is being made.

Hooray for the workin' man in overalls! :yourock:

No matter what solutions are proposed, this could be used in the meantime even if it only works on a small scale.

thing at all. The guys in the lab coats, though, have come up with far more effective sorbents for oil. The simple ones, like the hay and stray these guys are talking about, have their uses on small scale areas, though.

The cleanup is going to be very complicated and will use all sorts of technologies, including simple ones like these guys have rediscovered.

My bad for not putting up the sarcasm thingy. I agree that there are plenty of industry experts/scientists working on this. Once the gusher is stopped, I will likely be one of them in the field collecting samples or geoprocessing satellite imagery (my primary expertise).

We here in Louisiana are open to all suggestions, and as much help as folks are willing to offer (no 'hair booms' please).

is dried peat moss. Regular peat moss will work too, but it will sorb as much water as oil.

We've used it for bioremediation. The peat encapsulates the oil into its fibres, and the oil breaks down faster than the peat structure.

Most of the peat is farmed up here in Canada, but I think SphagSorb and NatureSorb distribute in Louisiana.

Sid

Let's say that we use hay bales to do this clean up. Where would be store the hay?

Could we place it on the flat of a desert which isn't connected to our aquifer? Since this hay dump will be several miles, is it possible to recover a desert by keeping the sand tamped down under the mulch of hay?

People have been looking for a use for that shit for many years now.

Why isn 't this already being done???

Why wasn't this tried BEFORE the dispersants? I hope this still works after the dispersants have been
put into the water.

BP is trying so hard to hide the extent of this damage.....they will not do anything that will really help!!
GET THIS INFO TO THE GOVT..YESTERDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No environmental group supports this because you need tons of hay to absorb small quantities and after the hay absorbs the oil, it sinks to the bottom where it's harder to clean than the original oil was. Worse, it sinks and smothers all the sea life that depends on the ocean floor where everything is trapped under a huge carpet of heavy, matted hay.

All the sealife that depend on the ocean floor did NOT die as a result. I don't understand why you are saying that the sealife died. It is not true.

http://www.rense.com/general90/barb.htm

But there is a ton of oil below the surface, and I don't think it would get that oil.

but if a farmer might make a nickel, you know DU is going to crap all over it.