Pictures: X PRIZE Contest Seeks Improved Oil Spill Cleanup

Coat of Shame

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic

A boom offered no protection for this brown pelican on Queen Bess Island in Louisiana as oil washed ashore in the weeks following the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documented that more than 900 of these birds were harmed by the Gulf oil spill, in just one example of the wildlife impact.

(Related: Gulf Spill Photos: 9 Animal Victims-Plus 2 Survivors)

The U.S. government concluded that only 3 percent of the 4.9 million barrels (206 million gallons/780 million liters) spilled in the Deepwater Horizon disaster was retrieved by skimmers. Just as in the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years earlier, where only 14 percent of the oil was recovered by cleanup crews, it was left to nature to fight most of the oil.

(Related Quiz: How Much Do You Know About the Gulf Oil Spill?)

(Related: "Nature Fighting Back Against Gulf Oil Spill")

In the summer of 2010, before the final cap was secured on the Macondo well, the X PRIZE Foundation announced it would launch a contest for "innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface."

How big is the technology improvement the X PRIZE is seeking to spur? Typical industry oil skimmers suck in a mix of oil and water at a maximum capacity of about 900 gallons (3,400 liters) per minute when tested at the Ohmsett facility. But to capture an Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE prize, a team has to demonstrate capability to skim at a rate of at least 2,500 gallons (9,500 liters) per minute, with no more than 30 percent water in the mix.

(Related: Gulf Oil Spill: One Year Later)

Published October 6, 2011

“V” in a Bid for Victory

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Norway's Team NOFI deploys its "Current Buster" technology, a flexible V-shaped surface boom during its test run at Ohmsett. The oil is corralled down to the end of the V, where a separator removes it from water.

The team had to demonstrate its own flexibility, as its test runs were interrupted in late August by Hurricane Irene. The site was evacuated, then closed for five days due to a power outage, while the team and contest officials decamped to Red Bank, New Jersey, six miles inland.

One of the contest judges, Peter Velez, global emergency response manager  for Shell*, said the scramble injected realism into the contest. "This is essentially similar to what we have to do with offshore operations in the Gulf," he said. "When you work on oil spill response, you have to bring innovation in facing adversity." In addition to Wendy Schmidt's sponsorship, Shell is a supporting partner of the competition, providing the oil used in the testing and just under $1.4 million used to pay the U.S. government for use of Ohmsett. In addition to Velez, the other seven contest judges include current and retired government oil spill officials, and spill response experts from industry and the environmental community.

For the oil cleanup challenge, X PRIZE officials faced a quandary: How to stage a fair contest on a level playing field, while testing the technology in real-world conditions.

Releasing oil in the environment was out of the question.  There was the possibility of dispatching contestants to clean up a real oil spill, should one occur. But besides being unpredictable, it would have been impossible to repeat the same weather and sea conditions for all 10 teams.

The X PRIZE officials opted to use the 2.6-million gallon (10-million liter) tank at Ohmsett, the the largest saltwater wave tank in North America and the only facility in the world designed for full-scale oil spill response research and training in controlled conditions. Twenty-four countries and numerous private companies have conducted oil spill cleanup testing there.

*Shell is sponsor of National Geographic's Great Energy Challenge initiative. National Geographic maintains autonomy over content.

Published October 6, 2011

The Carrying Power of the Sea

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Members of Finland's Team OilWhale guide their high-speed recovery system, which was built to be contained within a barge-like module pulled alongside or pushed in front of a vessel, or incorporated directly into a ship.

Team leader Markku Järvinen first developed the technology after watching the low recovery rate after an oil spill in the Gulf of Finland outside of Helsinki in the winter of 2003. His idea was to use the water as a carrier for the oil. While the moving ship takes in surface oil by a ramp, the oil floats on top of the collected water. The water is then released into the ocean by opening gates in the hull bottom, leaving the oil in the reservoir.

For each X PRIZE challenge run, 27,000 gallons (102,206 liters) of oil product was poured on the surface of the water in the 11-foot- (3.4-meter)-deep tank, creating a slick about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters deep). (It surprised test officials how the oil would collect on one side of the tank on a breezy day, and the test procedures included an effort to smooth out the oil as evenly as possible to ensure consistency from team to team.)

It is the largest volume of oil ever poured into the 65-by-666-foot (20-by-203-meter) Ohmsett tank at one time. That's significant, because Ohmsett has a longer than 40-year history of testing oil spill cleanup technology since it was originally built in the 1970s by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Government agencies and private companies have tested booms, the effectiveness of in situ burning of oil, and oil clean-up in ice conditions in the huge tank. There are plans to test sensor technology later this year for identifying oil leaks underwater.

Ohmsett was closed for a time in the late 1980s, but reopened again by order of Congress after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It is funded by a levy on the oil industry, and is now operated by the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE). Although the facility has kept its name, it dropped its original acronym, the Oil and Hazardous Materials Simulated Environmental Test Tank. It now boasts a wider mission, as a staging area for renewable energy technologies like wave energy, as well as oil-spill clean-up.

Published October 6, 2011

When Oil Meets Water

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Blue water appears beneath the swirls of oil as Team Crucial, of Gretna, Louisiana, tests its cleanup technology. Crucial manufactures an absorbent coating material that can be applied to the company's drum or disc surface skimmers; the team aimed to boost these devices' oil recovery rate by up to 500 percent.

Half of the 10 finalists in the X PRIZE competition, like Crucial, are already known in the oil recovery industry. During the Gulf oil spill, Crucial provided equipment for cleaning oil from wildlife.

Each of the ten X PRIZE finalist teams had a ten-day window at the Ohmsett facility, including time to set up, a "play day" to do test runs to optimize their systems, and several days for official test runs-three in calm water and three in wave conditions.

Ohmsett's computer-controlled wave generator allowed the test to be run in identical choppy sea conditions for each team. Movable bridges suspended over the tank simulate the decks of clean-up vessels. For the X PRIZE test, they glide over the tank at a speed as fast as 4 knots (the equivalent of 4.6 miles per hour/7.4 kilometers per hour on land.) On one of the bridges, the teams would connect their systems to a 10-inch flange that connected to oil collection tanks.

The test was designed to give the teams a 400-foot (122-meter) test field in which to collect the oil. They could move the "vessels" at whatever speed made the most sense for their systems, from 1 to 4 knots.  There were plenty of adjustments along the way.

"We've seen that with a number of our teams, when they run into mechanical problems, they tend to be very quick on their feet with reconfiguration," says Dorgelo.  "We saw a team ran into problems with one of their components and ended up within a half-hour building around it, and then seeing some pretty amazing performance numbers. We really like to see scrappy teams that think of creative solutions."

Published October 6, 2011

Getting in the Groove

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Four rows of giant grooved discs attack the test oil slick in the system developed by Team Elastec/American Marine of Carmi, Illinois, and Cocoa, Florida.

Elastec is a known company in the oil spill response world; its own Hydro-Fire® Boom was used in the Gulf spill for the controlled burns that actually eliminated more oil from the water oil than skimmers. But the grooved disc skimmers Elastec has entered into the X CHALLENGE have a diameter four or five times larger than the disc or drum skimmers that are standard equipment in oil spill response.

Seeking to ramp up performance with a new size and configuration is typical of how many competitors excel in X PRIZE competitions, says Dorgelo. The same was true, she said, in the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE last year, where the engineers from Lynchburg, Virginia, who designed a 102.5 mile-per-gallon (44-kilometer-per-liter) vehicle that relied on ultralight materials and aerodynamics.

"There was no secret sauce to an efficient car, but rather known pieces of cars were assembled in a different way," she said. "We think while the breakthrough in the performance may be radical, the actual sub-components and systems are just being assembled in a unique and creative way."

Donald Toenshoff Jr., executive vice president of the Marine Spill Response Corporation (MSRC), who is one of eight oil spill experts serving as contest judges, agrees: "What you're seeing in many cases is very much an evolutionary change rather than a revolutionary change."

MSRC, an oil-industry-funded nonprofit set up after the Exxon Valdez spill to serve as a rapid response force, could become a future purchaser of equipment proven during the X PRIZE competition. Toenshoff says there is likely not one "silver bullet" technology. "The key is to have enough tools in the toolkit so that went you are faced with a certain situation, or type oil, you can then go to the right tool," he says.

"I've been intrigued by this whole process," he adds. "You still at the end of the day need to overcome physics-gravity and adhesion and viscosity, all those various components. But I've seen some interesting deployments some things that may work quite well in certain circumstances."

Published October 6, 2011

Tarred With A Different Brush

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Finland's Team Lamor, which has been in the oil response business since 1982, tackled the oil with a patented "oleophilic" brush technology-literally, a brush that has an affinity for oil.

Testing followed a familiar pattern for each of the teams. A judge, standing on one of the bridges, would throw a green flag to signal the testing start. The bridges would move down the tank at a speed selected by the team, anywhere from 1 to 4 knots. The test ended when the judge threw the red flag, signaling either that the team had reached the end of the test run or that the tanks were already full-signaling a stellar recovery rate. Asked if the X PRIZE anticipated it would see recovery rates high enough to fill the tanks, Dorgelo said, "We certainly hoped we would."

After the test run, the PRIZE officials gave the teams a signal to vacate the bridges, and Ohmsett engineers gathered data and collect samples to be tested at the on-site laboratory. This "most important part" of the process, in Dorgelo's words, requires gathering a significant amount of information on temperature, concentration, even tensile characteristics-how much force it takes to separate the oil from water. With all of the data gathering, the turnaround time between tests was about two hours.

Published October 6, 2011

High-Speed Separation

Photograph by Marianne Lavelle, National Geographic

Team Voraxial developed a high "g" force continuous flow machine designed to separate large volumes of fluids based on their different densities. Its trademarked Voraxial impeller produces a vortex in which the heavier fluid-water-is meant to be drawn to the outside, while the lighter fluid-oil-is drawn to the center.

"There's no technology on the market that can skim and separate under water, and that's where our advantage is," says Laura Di Bella, who is vice president of marketing and investor relations for the family company based in Ford Lauderdale, Florida.

Her father and team member, Alberto Di Bella, had a long history of working in the aerospace industry, and was founder and president of a company that worked on the gyroscope housing for the Hubble Space Telescope, on gear shift systems, and in beryllium manufacturing. For her father, now 81, to watch the X PRIZE testing of the oil spill technology he worked on was "a sweet experience," says Laura. "Essentially, it's the culmination of the American dream for him, a Sicilian immigrant who came here with no money and without the language to work his way up into being a well-recognized manufacturer," she says. "We want to see him succeed one last time, but it goes beyond that. We believe in the technology, and our work on it is a gift we're giving back to him for the gift he's given us."

Published October 6, 2011

The Art of Cleanup

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Members of Team Vor-Tek chat behind their EEL, or Emergency Extraction Line, a series of joined horizontal modules designed to float out from a support vessel or oil platform in a setup known as a "weir" boom, meant to alter water flow. A pipeline running through the modules is joined to a high‐power pump that draws oil and water through intakes to be fed into a separator on the vessel or platform.

Describing themselves as "environmentally conscious artists and entrepreneurs," the members of Vor-Tek, based in Las Vegas, Nevada, have no background in the oil business. Team leader Ashley Day came from the scrap metal business, where he had worked on technology to improve the recycling and had applied it to work on plastics pollution in the Pacific Ocean. His partner, Fred Giovannitti, is a tatoo artist known for his work on celebrities.

Like another one of the U.S. teams, Pacific Petroleum Recovery, or PPR, (not pictured in this gallery), they applied technology they knew from other fields. (PPR's team members came to call their system an "oil-slurping, fish-sucking, pickle-pumping machine.")

"That's very standard for X PRIZE, those unusual players organizing around a challenge," says Dorgelo. "While the prize certainly is an incentive, they are in it for the mission as much as the money. The money certainly attracts public attention but the great thing is they walk away with the value of testing, which is in a sense more valuable than the prize purse, and they walk away with exposure for these new brands they are trying to get built."

Published October 6, 2011

Inflexible in the Oil Battle

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Team Koseq, from Puttershoek in The Netherlands, invented their rigid sweeping arm, called the Victory Oil Sweeper, more than 30 years ago in cooperation with the Dutch Coast Guard.

The two forward-angled inflexible floating arms channel surface oil into a skimmer mounted between them; they envision that it could be pushed in front of a small vessel or pulled alongside a larger one. The angle of the arms can be adjusted to sweep wide or to fit through narrow waterways.

After the Gulf oil spill, Shell sought ways to stimulate a significant change in oil spill cleanup recovery, "not just a tweaking of what was available," Velez said. "We spend a lot of time on the prevention of any spill," said Velez. "We still need to have any equipment to be ready for response." Shell saw the X PRIZE, he said, as an "excellent process to essentially look for a step change in oil spill response equipment that is available."

(Related "Pictures: Four New Offshore Drilling Frontiers")

But  Velez says that whatever team captures the top prize will not be the only winner. All 10 of the finalist teams will now have real-world data on their systems that will be publicly available to oil companies, oil spill response organizations, and nations around the world that have to be ready to grapple with oil spills.

"It's like test-driving ten different cars," he says. "We are doing a test drive of ten different systems. Each team that gets a week in that tank--all that data is going to be publicly available for the customers like ourselves who are looking for the best equipment."

Published October 6, 2011

Trawling to Clean The Water

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Norway's Team OilShaver sought to apply team members' knowledge of trawl technologies for fisheries to oil spill response. The device has a pair of parallel floating pontoons with a neoprene/polyester "floor" running lengthwise between them. It is designed to sit at a 45-degree angle from the side of a moving vessel and "shave" the oil from the water surface. A weighted slit along the floor bottom allows the water to escape, while the oil is pumped onto the storage vessel.

Published October 6, 2011

A Patron for Protection

Photograph courtesy X Prize Foundation

Oil cleanup X CHALLENGE sponsor Wendy Schmidt (pictured above) donned the required hard hat and life jacket to get up on deck and see some of the competition first-hand this summer.

Dorgelo remembers how quickly Schmidt stepped forward with an offer to sponsor this competition after X PRIZE reached out to its trustees and donors last year while oil was still gushing from the Macondo well. Typically, it takes more than a year to develop an X PRIZE contest, Dorgelo says. But the Foundation's leadership felt that urgently tackling the issues raised by the Gulf spill was deeply aligned with its mission.

Since its founding in 1996, the X PRIZE Foundation has been staging competitions designed to prompt research collaborations to tackle urgent world challenges in energy and environment, education, life sciences, and space and ocean exploration. Its informal motto is "revolution through competition."

In the X Prize world, the oil cleanup contest is a "challenge," one of a class of smaller awards designed to solve a well-defined technical problem that has no clear path to a solution or is perceived as difficult.

That certainly has been the case in oil spill cleanup, where there hasn't been enough of a market-based push to spur innovation. "We are looking at an old operating system: last century's energy infrastructure coupled with an inadequate and out-of-date understanding of the human relationship with natural resources," Schmidt wrote in an essay at the time the contest was announced in July 2010, just after the BP well had been stopped with a temporary cap. "We need Version 2.0. The sooner the better."

Schmidt said that sponsoring the competition "is the most constructive response I can have to the psychic anguish-in addition to the personal losses-so many people have experienced as the Gulf Oil Spill crisis has gone on."

In addition to the prize purse, Schmidt donated an additional $1.4 million to support the X PRIZE Foundation's operations from the launch through the awards ceremony.

Published October 6, 2011

The Changing Face of Oil

Photograph by Marianne Lavelle, National Geographic

To make sure that the naturally clear refined oil product used in the X CHALLENGE  (left two jars) is visible during the testing, it was dyed a hot pink color before it was poured into the tank. But after it had been in the tank for a period of time-exposed to wind, generated waves, and sun-it took on a dark molasses hue.

(Related Photos: Gulf Oil Spill Pictures: Oiled Beaches Time Line)

One of the only things that is certain about oil that is spilled in the sea is that it will change. Once it is hit by sun and affected by weather, it will become thicker and more viscous. Oil that is churned in waves will emulsify, and may take on an orange hue. After time the oil congeals into tar balls. Both dispersants and the simple impact of traveling up through 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) of water changed the characteristics of the crude from the Gulf oil spill.

(Related Interactive Map: Oiled Gulf Beaches During & After and "Why Did Huge Oil Plumes Form After the Gulf Spill?")

"One of our enemies" in fighting the Gulf spill last year was the changing characteristic of the oil, recalls Edwin Levine, scientific support coordinator for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Levine, who is based not far from Ohmsett in New York City, has long worked on oil spill cleanup research, so he came to witness part of the X PRIZE competition.

In order to provide consistency in the spill competition, the X PRIZE chose to use a refined oil product called HydroCal 300, which is frequently used in field experiments. Its reaction in the weathering process can be relied upon to be repeatable from one test to another, and it does not have the strong fumes that some types of oil, including crude, would have, which might have necessitated that the contestants and officials use breathing apparatus.

But the best oil for a competition is not necessarily the next oil that will foul the sea. While Levine voices support for the X CHALLENGE contest, he cautions that the winning it won't be the last word in oil spill cleanup. "For a heavier oil spill or lighter oil spill, it may or may not be the right solution," he says. "It depends on the sea state or the temperature or the oil. So whatever comes out of here as the best is only the best for this situation."

(Related: Awards for Change: How Prizes Can Help Us Achieve Energy Goals and  

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Published October 6, 2011