Sunday, May 16, 2010

The Secret, 700-Million-Gallon Oil Fix That Worked — and Might Save the Gulf

There's a potential solution to the Gulf oil spill that neither BP, nor the federal government, nor anyone — save a couple intuitive engineers — seems willing to try. As The Politics Blog reported on Tuesday in an interview with former Shell Oil president John Hofmeister, the untapped solution involves using empty supertankers to suck the spill off the surface, treat and discharge the contaminated water, and either salvage or destroy the slick.

There's a potential solution to the Gulf oil spill that neither BP, nor the federal government, nor anyone — save a couple intuitive engineers — seems willing to try. As The Politics Blog reported on Tuesday in an interview with former Shell Oil president John Hofmeister, the untapped solution involves using empty supertankers to suck the spill off the surface, treat and discharge the contaminated water, and either salvage or destroy the slick.

From: Jon King
Sent: Monday, May 10, 2010 2:05 PM
To: Captain Ed Stanton
Cc: Nick Pozzi
Subject: Procedures Developed thru Lessons Learned
Re: Salt Water Clean-Up
Importance: High

Dear Captain Stanton,

Per your request this morning, this is to confirm our conversation with yourself, Mr. Nick Pozzi, and I.

My colleague, Nick Pozzi, has worked for over 40 years in the energy industry the majority with Saudi Aramco in the Middle East. During that time, Nick's team was part of the first responders that successfully cleaned similar sized spills of sweet and sour crude with the best technology available from the late 1980's thru the 1990's when he retired.

The primary equipment that was used to remove the crude from the Arabian Gulf was Super Tankers. The Super Tankers were used to store everything, run thru on-shore three-phase separators and sent to on-shore tank farms for additional clean up using centrifuges. The more the oil spreads the more tankers will be needed. Nick would be willing to provide a conceptual non-technical drawing to visualize this process.

This process not only cleaned up the ocean but it saved the local environment, minimized shoreline damage, and recovered approximately 85% of the crude oil. (Nick may be required to get permission from Saudi Aramco thru the Houston, Texas office in Sugar Land to provide you with any further details as to what information he is allowed to disclose to you regarding the various projects that he worked on.)

Nick does not know what the appropriate channels are to effectuate this process but feels, if asked, the Saudi Government may be willing to assist as he believes, that with the right calls, tankers could be on the scene in 2 days.

Please feel free to call Nick or I, if you need any additional information or have any questions.

Sincerely,

Jon King
Nick Pozzi

UPDATED (11:47 A.M.): After our initial conversations earlier this week, John Hofmeister talked about the Saudi spill and potential supertanker fix for the Gulf this morning on the Today show....

Esquire

1 Comments:

Blogger Mister Ghost said...

Mad Tom,
You can adjust the Youtube videos so that they don't overflow into the sidebar. Look at the HTML code for them - they usually have two sets of height and width parameters you can change. For this site, it seems 400 for a width is good.

12:47 PM  

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