BP hopes new device will put teeth into beach cleanup

By Ben Chambers

c.2010 Cox Newspapers

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - On beaches from Florida to Mississippi, the Sand Shark is the wave of the future, BP says.

The oil company recently developed and deployed the first of the oil-eating machines near Pensacola, to clean sand contaminated over the past four months by its Deepwater Horizon blowout.

Four more are scheduled to be rolled out in the next several weeks.

Conventional beach-cleaners scoop up sand and shake it to sift out bottles, seaweed and cigarette butts, a technique that doesn't work well for brittle or gooey tar balls.

"With tar balls, you don't want to shake them really hard, because they break into small pieces and go back into the sand," said Keith Seilhan, BP's incident commander for Florida, Alabama and Mississippi.

Eight weeks ago, Seilhan put a team together to develop a beach "polisher" that would do the job right, resulting in the Sand Shark.

The orange machine swallows sand down to 18 inches below the beach surface, then sifts it with a 2-millimeter mesh screen to remove tar balls. In some places, oil is buried 2 feet below the surface, so some of it needs to be dug up before the Sand Shark's 8-foot-wide jaws can get at it.

"When we accomplish getting these beaches clean down to the level of 2 millimeters or less, any small particle that's below that is going to be cleaned up by Mother Nature with the tide cycles, and that's an accepted method for cleaning," Seilhan said. "If you look at a beach and that white sand is very clean, one reason is that there is naturally occurring bacteria in that sand and in the water, and any little small particles that they can eat, they eat."

While the company begins to use the new Sand Sharks, machines proposed by others -- some even ready and standing by -- have so far gone unused.

Of tens of thousands of inventions submitted to help BP's cleanup efforts, BP approved only a few for use. One that came out on top, the Beach Restoration System, uses those same oil-munching microbes found in seawater, along with high-velocity mixing and biodegradable detergents, to remove oil from the sand.

But BP isn't using it, at least not yet; the oil company says it prefers its own device.

"We've got five units standing by, and we can have all five of them out there in a few days," said Bill Carmichael, a partner at Houston-based Proven Technologies, which designed the Beach Restoration System.

The technology was created to separate petroleum from oil sand deposits in Canada and Texas. Painted like a beach ball, the Beach Restoration System can clean 700 tons of sand in a typical 12-hour shift, the company says.

The system sucks oily sand through a rotating nozzle into a stream of rapidly flowing seawater, subjecting it to "shearing forces" that rip most of the hydrocarbons from each grain of sand.

Next, the oil, sand and water mix with an EPA-approved detergent and microbes indigenous to the area. The mixture then enters a hydrocyclone, similar to a washing machine's spin cycle, to remove most of the water and detergent, which are recycled back into the system.

Finally, the sand returns to the beach, where microbes continue eating any oil or detergent residue that remains, for up to 12 days.

"We found that up in Pensacola it was necessary to do that kind of a procedure, because up there the sand is sugar-white," said Harold Gerdes, director of research and development for Clean Beach Technologies, which built the system. "So after you clean it, you want to be able to put it back and have it look the same."

While BP is using a hot-water sand washing system in Louisiana, Seilhan said there are no plans to do any sort of sand washing on other beaches, but that could change.

"There may be some parts of a beach, or even a marsh, that will require some kind of a more intense spot cleaning, and that's where these tools will likely be used," Seilhan said. "If we get to an area where we have something that was contaminated pretty deeply and maybe the sand got stained, that might be the preferred option. But I personally do not like those kind of intrusive cleaning methods. They're, to me, a last resort."

But will the Sand Shark take a bite out of Panhandle beach oil?

A study led by University of South Florida geologist Ping Wang found that BP's initial efforts to remove oil from beaches, by hand with crews of workers and volunteers, resulted in tar balls crushing into tiny pieces, making the oil's mechanical removal next to impossible.

"BP has done a really superficial cleanup," Wang said. "What they did is a quick and dirty job. They crushed all those oil sheets into small pieces from driving on it."

Wang's report includes a photo taken of the beach in Gulf Shores, Ala., on July 26, after workers had cleaned the beach. The sand was covered with thousands of little tar balls, as well as with tire tracks.

"The Sand Shark wasn't there yet," Seilhan said, responding to Wang's report. "So I'm hoping this guy is going to go out with his camera next spring and show the same picture, because things will be different. They'll definitely be more positive."

Ben Chambers writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: ben(underscore)chambers(at)pbpost.com.

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