Elastec/American Marine, which makes oil spill and environmental equipment, just won The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, a yearlong competition with participants from all over the world vying for who could achieve the highest oil recovery and efficiency rates from surface seawater.
Elastec won $1.4 million in first place prize money last week. “During a ceremony in New York, it was announced that we exceeded the competition’s oil recovery requirement of 2,500 gpm (gallons per minute) with 70 percent efficiency (oil recovered in percentage to water).
“Our new ‘Grooved Disc Skimmer’ was able to recover 4,670 gpm with an 89.5 percent efficiency, more than three times the industry’s previous best oil recovery rate tested in controlled conditions,” said the company.
The second place winner receiving a prize of $300,000 was NOFI Tromsø AS, a Norway oil spill control developer specializing in oil boom technology.
NOFI used a single vessel unit called the ‘Current Buster 6’ which collects, separates, and stores oil in a current up to five knots. The system incorporates a flexible v-shaped surface boom that when towed, corrals oil down to the end of the V where a separator removes it from the water.
NOFI’s Current Buster 6 technology being demonstrated last summer at Ohmsett – the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility in Leonardo, N.J. Photo courtesy of NOFI.
NOFI’s cleanup method had an oil recovery rate of 271.2 gpm, and 83 percent oil-to-water recovery rate for the ‘oil recovery efficiency’ requirement of the competition.
Ten finalist teams demonstrated their oil cleanup technologies individually during a 10-week field testing period last summer at Ohmsett – the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility in Leonardo, N.J.
The test facility is the largest outdoor saltwater wave/tow tank facility in North America and is the only facility where full-scale oil spill response equipment testing, research, and training can be conducted in a marine environment with oil under controlled conditions.
An industry panel of judges oversaw the demonstrations at Ohmsett. Each team was evaluated on criteria, including:
- the technical viability of the plan.
- having no negative environmental impact.
- the cost and human labor of implementation.
- the scalability and ability to commercially deploy the technology.
- the improvement of the oil recovery rate and efficiency rate over the current baseline ability.
The panel of eight industry experts, included such notable judges as: Hung Nguyen, emergency oil spill response coordinator at the engineering and research branch at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management; Dave Westerholm, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) office of response and restoration; and Peter K. Velez, global emergency response manager for Shell International Exploration and Production.
Shell was the only member of the oil industry to contribute to the organizing of the competition. The oil company helped in providing direct support for the technical, operational, and scientific components of the competition.
Shell also said that it would “work with the X Prize Foundation to bring in oil experts and other industry leaders to help promote, utilize, and bring the winning technology to market.
The competition was launched in July 2010 – soon after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The foundation said that a big part of the competition was to “inspire entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface.”
The X Prize Foundation is a leading nonprofit group that looks for solutions to the world’s great problems by creating prize competitions that stimulate investment in research and development. Past prizes include the $10 million Ansari X Prize for a private, suborbital space flight.
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