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Thursday's presentation to the ONS2010 conference in Stavanger, Norway by Hollywood actor Kevin Costner might be dismissed as another environmentalist celebrity mixing it, Davos-style, with ministers and chief executives -- were it not that the oil-spill response technology offered by Costner's company, Ocean Therapy Solutions (OTS), has already faced an extreme baptism by fire, playing a key role in cleaning up the US Gulf of Mexico following the Macondo spill.
Built around a centrifuge design for which Costner bought the original patent from the US Department of Energy in 1993 -- thereafter investing more than $20 million of his own money in further development -- OTS offers a shipboard oil and water centrifugal separation machine, of which the five-ton V20 version can handle up to 210,000 gallons per day.
The obvious advantage of separator-equipped spill response boats is that by only pumping oil into their tanks and returning the water to sea, they gather more oil while at sea than more conventional, separator-less skimming vessels, which have...