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| Equipment Clean Beach Technologies has designed to help clean the contaminated oil from the beaches in the Gulf of Mexico. |
Oil giant BP is turning to a BEYA award winner's company for help in cleaning up the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, 39 News reported on its website Tuesday. BP chose Clean Beach Technology, saying it has the tools to clean contaminated beaches. 39 News was the first to see the technology up close, they said.
"It summarizes what we are doing at Clean Beach Technologies to remediate the beaches, one of three tiers of our strategy to help fight this war on the spill." CEO Tony Watson said. "We are still working with BP to authorize our strategy to create a blockade to keep oil from reaching the beaches in the first place.
Tony Watson, a 31-year U.S. Navy veteran and 1988 winner of the Black Engineer of the Year Government Award, says that stopping the flow of oil can be fixed immediately by new technology ready for immediate deployment.
According to 39 News, the invention (shown above) is among the top five ideas selected by BP out of over 80 thousand entries. It's called the Beach Remediation System. Clean Beach describes it as a giant washing machine for contaminated sand.
"We're optimistic," said Steven Sommers, Principal Investor for Clean Beach Technologies. " We're doing something to help solve the problem where the problem actually exists." The machines are actual modifications of those originally designed to clean Canadian tar sands.
"The two problems are very similar," said Sommers. "You have tar sand where you want to extract oil from and we have a situation where we actually want to destroy the oil and remove all of the oil."
Sand is placed into a hopper and goes through a shearing process. It reduces the tar bars to the size of grains of pepper. Water is then pumped under the hoppers to wash out the sand. A cleaning solution called Petro Clean has bio friendly microbes that eat the tar balls. The clean beach method allows the clean sand to be put back on the beach.
"We're rating the machines at a hundred tons of sand a day," said Sommers. "You're talking about thousands of miles of coastline that can be potentially contaminated. You need something you can deploy on a wide basis."
Source: http://www.39online.com/news/local/kiah-clean-beach-technology-story,0,6657588.story
