Kevin Costner Oil Spill Machine

Kevin Costner could be the Oil Spill hero. ABC reports that Costner has been funding a team of scientists for 15 years in hopes of developing a technology to clean up massive oil spills, and his research has created a powerful centrifuge that he claims can separate oil from water and dump the oil into a holding tank.

Costner and representatives of Ocean Therapy Solutions, the firm that developed the machine, demonstrated the centrifugal device for BP officials in New Orleans last week. “I believe they’ll want to do the right thing,” Costner told reporters at the time.

“The machines are basically sophisticated centrifuge devices that can handle a huge volume of water and separate at unprecedented rates,” said Ocean Therapy Solutions CEO John Houghtaling. “They were developed from older centrifuge technology. Normal centrifuge machines are very slow and sensitive to different ratios of oil to water mixtures at intake.”

The devices, which can be taken to the spill site via barges, come in different sizes. The largest can clean water at a rate of 200 gallons per minute — more than 50 gallons faster than the well is leaking, according to the firm. Depending on the water to oil ratio, the devices are capable of extracting 2,000 barrels of oil per day from the gulf. BP is employing six of the machines in its tests.

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