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No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings;
it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception.
Carl Sagan
The Problem
Spills and leaks of crude oil and refined oil products present a number of issues:
they are a waste of a valuable product, which increases costs for all consumers
crude oil and many refined oil products are toxic (poisonous) and constitute hazardous waste
crude oil and many refined oil products are carcinogenic
just a drop of oil can contaminate many litres of water, making the water unfit to drink
oil contamination is persistent - it can last for decades
it is disruptive to communities, sometimes catastrophically
Without doubt, cleaning up oil spills is complicated by a number of factors: product types;
oil characteristics; environmental and weather conditions, inaccessibility, lack of preparedness, etc.
Exacerbating this problem is the fact that most people believe the oil industry is either doing
an adequate job of cleaning up oil spills (they aren't), or that better tools simply are not available
(they are) or are not affordable (actually more cost-effective than current mainstream approaches).
Our goal is to put better tools (in terms of cost, effectiveness, environmental impact) into use, and educate
as to why change is needed and why the tools we represent are better.
The
problem isn't new (article from 1921), so it's troubling to see the oil industry hasn't really developed or
embraced any real innovation since the 1960s. But, if you want to do oil spill clean-up right,
you can start here.
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