Do you have any suggestions on how to stop the flow of oil or contain the spill? Submit them to BP

[Pathfinder]

Suggestions

What is being done with submitted suggestions?

Throughout the ongoing response efforts thousands of people across the globe have offered their ideas for stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf, containing or recovering it, or cleaning it up.

BP has established a process to receive and review submitted suggestions, on how to stop the flow of oil or contain the spill emanating from the Mississippi Canyon 252 well. Proposals are reviewed for their technical feasibility and proof of application.

More than 4,800 ideas have been proposed to date. Given this quantity of technical proposals suggested by industry professionals and the public, it may take some time to technically review each one.

All proposals submitted through the process defined below will be reviewed.

Failure to follow the process below will likely delay proposed solutions from being reviewed.

If you want to offer suggestions by phone:

Please call 281.366.5511. After each call, the caller will be sent a simple form to provide details. When the caller completes and submits this form, the proposal is sent to BP technical personnel for review.

If you want to offer suggestions online:

A suggestion submission form is available at: http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/clients/2931/319487.pdf. Follow instructions on the form.

For most timely review, please use this process to submit your suggestion.


What happens with your proposal?

• All proposals are reviewed for technical feasibility and application. Given the volume of proposals, this may take some time. A reply will be sent via email or fax to each caller informing them of the technical review outcome.
• Feasible solutions will be forwarded for additional consideration. Callers whose ideas are considered feasible will be advised by email that we will contact them if and when their support is needed.

Unified Command thanks each submitter for their interest and willingness to share their ideas.

http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/546759/

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Do you have any suggestions on how to stop the flow of oil or contain the spill? Submit them to BP

British Petroleum needs your help

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By DALE McFEATTERS
Syndicated columnist

Published: Monday, May 17, 2010 at 6:58 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, May 17, 2010 at 6:58 a.m.

<!-- /PUBDATE -->Not that the company is desperate or anything, but BP (British Petroleum) is soliciting suggestions from the public on how to contain, clean up or recover the oil from its runaway well deep under the Gulf of Mexico.

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It says it has received more than 4,800 suggestions so far and promises to review each one for technical feasibility and get back to the senders on the fate of their proposals. The public is not lacking in originality. Several Web sites have collected the more colorful proposals.

One that BP has seriously entertained is creating a dome over the leak and packing it with selected trash - golf balls, and pieces of old tires and used rope. I don't know about used rope, but we have old tires and golf balls in abundance.

Prime a vacant lot with a few old tires and soon they will be joined by several hundred other old tires. All BP has to do is harvest them.
Scientists searching for the Loch Ness monster instead found 100,000 golf balls. The water hazards of our golf courses must be virtual gold mines of lost balls. By one estimate, our golfers lose about 300 million balls every year.

The Norwegians have had good luck cleaning up oil spills with specially treated, highly absorbent peat moss. Then you have the problem of what to do with a couple of million tons of oil-soaked peat moss. Working it into the nation's rose beds would be time and labor intensive. A better bet might be to mulch the national forests.

One drawback to peat moss is that it apparently sinks after awhile. So someone suggested that the site of the leak be carpeted with a giant bed of floating wood chips. The wood chips would soak up the oil and then be hauled off for use as fuel in electric power plants.

An ecology-minded West Coast outfit has proposed making absorbent mats and booms out of human and pet hair. The Village Voice noted, somewhat gratuitously, "Hair is good at soaking up oil, which you'd know if you ever had to sit behind a band nerd in class." That would entail sweeping out a lot of barbershops and hair salons and anyway the idea has a strong "ick" factor.

One inventor proposed a giant, mile-long flexible cone. The narrow end would be clamped over the well and the oil would flow to the surface where supertankers would pump it out of the wide end of the cone and take it off to be refined.

Maybe BP could simply skip a step in the process and anchor a floating refinery over the well and turn the oil into gasoline as soon as it bubbles up to the surface. Summer driving season is almost here so there would be a ready market for it.

A Russian newspaper has helpfully proposed using nuclear bombs, the assumption being that the force of the blast would clamp the well shut.

The newspaper said that the Soviet Union used underground nukes five times to shut down assorted petroleum disasters. The paper said a bomb about 1.5 times the size of the one used at Hiroshima would do it. That may not be the easiest sell on the Gulf Coast.

So think of something and tell BP. Not that they're desperate yet. We'll know that when BP executives start haunting golf course, barbershops and garden supply centers.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer and columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.

http://www.newschief.com/article/20100517/NEWS/5175043?p=all&tc=pgall

 

[Sally Furniss]

Re: Do you have any suggestions on how to stop the flow of oil or contain the spill? Submit them to BP

Coast Guard seeks private sector oil spill solutions
By Robert Brodsky rbrodsky@govexec.com June 7, 2010

Do you know how to stop the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Then the Coast Guard wants to hear from you.

The broad agency announcement calls for the submission of white paper ideas on

five distinct problem areas:

tracking and detecting oil;

controlling or shutting off the wellhead;

developing traditional and alternative oil spill response technologies,

damage assessments; and

restoration.

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0610/060710rb1.htm

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Do you have any suggestions on how to stop the flow of oil or contain the spill? Submit them to BP

Local surgeons say they have plan that can patch oil leak

by Meg Farris / Eyewitness News
wwltv.com
Posted on June 7, 2010 at 10:06 PM

NEW ORLEANS -- BP has received thousands of suggestions from the public about how to fix the leak and how to clean up the massive spill.

You've even heard from famous Hollywood celebrities on their ideas, but now two local doctors are coming forward hoping BP will listen to ideas they say will work.

It's what surgeons are trained to do everyday in the O.R. to save lives: stop the bleeding. And now two local doctors say it makes sense to do the same on the Gulf floor.

"It looks like the ocean floor is bleeding and we know how to stop bleeding," said Dr. Steve Ramee, Ochsner Medical Center's section head of interventional cardiology.

Both Ramee and LSU Health Sciences Center General and Plastic Surgeon Dr. Kamran Khoobehi believe the concept used to stop bleeding, going against the blood pressure in an artery, can be used to stop the gushing oil.

Khoobehi stayed up until 3 a.m. getting a graphic made and even made a model using sheet rock clay, a whittled Chinese chop stick, a straw and duct tape to demonstrate a way to plug the hole.

"It is cheap to build. It does not require very complex engineering and really it can be fabricated in two or three days," Khoobehi said.

His device uses a circular wedge that starts off small and gets bigger, supported by a huge, heavy concrete plug. He said that would gradually go against the pressure of the leak. As the pressure builds, the weight of the concrete block would counteract it.

"The main thing is that you need to have smaller diameter at the beginning and a wider diameter at the base of it," Dr. Khoobehi said.
He ran it by an oil engineer and a structural engineer who say, in theory, it should work.

"That frictional force will eventually, as long as the pipe holds together which I'm sure it will because it's a high pressure pipe, that will eventually cause enough force to overcome the force of the oil coming out of the ground," said Roy Carubba, a structural engineer.
When Carubba was asked why he thinks in theory this could work, he responded, "Physics. It's a simple matter of physics."

Ramee said there are nearly a dozen ways he can stop bleeding. Some of them include threading smaller tubes in vessels and deploying stents.

Some stents can gradually, in steps, block more and more of the flow.

Others can close off a leak, while others can redirect the flow of blood from a bigger tube to a smaller one. That method, he said, would not only plug the oil leak but channel it to a connecting tube to capture the oil.

"We make these things tiny. We need to make them so they are 21 inches in diameter, which would take, you know, some Cajuns and some engineers a week to do," said Dr. Ramee.

The doctors believe these principles can work.

"The demands are going to be working with the engineers in the oil industry to determine what, how strong do these need to be. But computer modeling now can do this and I can show them designs working with some medical device companies and medical devise engineers of exactly how to build this, how big to build it, how strong to build it," Ramee said.

Both doctors have tried to get their concepts through to either government officials, or oil support companies, or BP itself, but have not heard back from anyone.

Khoobehi has already calculated the weight and size that his device would need to be based on the pressure reading posted on the BP website.

Video available at:
http://www.wwltv.com/video/featured-videos/Local-surgeons-say-they-can-patch-oil-leak-95826329.html