Local company to be part of Gulf of Mexico cleanup effort

  • By Sharon Haught
  • June 26, 2010
  • 485
                        
With millions of gallons of oil from the crippled Deepwater Horizon oil well pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, one Wooster company will be doing its part to aid in the massive cleanup effort. Wooster-based ABS Materials will be dispatching equipment and its patented Osorb material to the gulf to help in the effort to separate the millions of gallons of oil/water mixture collected as part of the recovery effort. Osorb is a silico-based nano-glass material capable of capturing organic compounds such as oil, gasoline and solvents in contaminated water without capturing the water itself. is based on the cutting-edge research being conducted by ABS Materials chief science officer and College of Wooster professor Dr. Paul Edmiston. According to Dr. Paul Edmiston, ABS Materials chief science officer and College of Wooster professor, on whose cutting-edge research on nano-glass the Osorb product is based, not only can the product collect the crude oil itself, it is also capable of collecting the oil dispersal chemicals currently being employed in the gulf to break up the spill. During Governor Ted Strickland’s June 21 visit to Wooster, ABS Materials chief executive officer Stephen Spoonamore advised the governor that after making some modifications to the equipment, the company is ready to ship out the unit to the gulf. Ironically the company’s first client for the originally designed equipment was BP itself. “The first client of that unit was scheduled to be BP,” said Spoonamore, noting that the order for the unit was placed before the Deepwater Horizon spill. “It was scheduled to be going to Wyoming where it would be operating today, except all of the people involved in the project have been pulled in to the disaster center,” Spoonamore informed the governor. Spoonamore described the equipment as “a small commercial unit that was built to treat a small oil field.” “Oil fields in the west that produce gas generally have two to three barrels a minute of wastewater,” Spoonamore explained, noting that the equipment was sized and configured to deal with the produced water brines from that small gas field. According to Spoonamore, while the unit was initially configured specifically for that use, BP officials asked that it be reconfigured for use in the gulf. While the unit was initially configured to treat produced water, the equipment is now also capable of treating “emulsional mousses (which) are the brown froth where seawater and oil churn with wind and make a foam.” Spoonamore noted that the equipment can “treat 100 gallons a minute of that kind of water, recover the oil and free the sea water.” While the unit is ready to go, “because of the scale of the disaster there literally is no parking at the few docks where this is serviced, so we are waiting for them to create a spot for us,” said Spoonamore adding that the equipment is currently scheduled to “be deployed on July fifth at a treatment facility.”


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