Fishing for oil

THE SEAS HAD TURNED ROUGH as a sudden squall whipped up the winds enough to howl through the rigging. And with those winds came a powerful smell of oil. Soon I could see the characteristic rainbow sheen from my position on the rail of this fishing trawler. It was May of 2016, and we were in the Gulf of Mexico, about 16 kilometers off the southeast coast of Louisiana. · "Skimmer in the water," bellowed Kevin Kennedy, an Alaskan fisherman turned oil-spill remediation entrepreneur. Ropes groaned as the boat's winches lowered his prototype oil-recovery system into the heaving seas. As the trawler bobbed up and down, Kennedy's contraption rode the waves, its open mouth facing into the slick, gulping down a mix of seawater and crude oil. u The stomach of Kennedy's device, to continue the analogy, was a novel separator, which digested the mixture of seawater and oil. By virtue of its clever engineering, it excreted essentially nothing but water. At the top of the separator's twin tanks, the collected oil began to swell. When enough had accumulated, the oil was sucked safely into a storage tank. Then the cycle would begin again.