Every Little Bit Helps

The good news: a California company says it can manufacture a powder that will soak up oil and wants to know why BP and the government hasn't tapped it for help.

The company, Mobius Technologies, grinds foam from desk chairs and car seats into a powder. Applied to oil, the powder — called micronized polyurethane powder — quickly absorbs the oil and forms a cake that floats on water indefinitely.

"We're just the best sorbent solution that hasn't been applied," said Mobius manager Brian Hennessy.

The company submitted its idea to BP online several weeks ago but hasn't received a response. BP spokesman Mark Proegler said it received 80,000 such suggestions from the public. He said he hadn't heard of Mobius.

Now the company has enlisted the help of Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, who is backing its push to get its powder tested by BP for possible use in the gulf. Matsui wrote a letter to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson on Monday urging Jackson to look into BP's lack of response.

The bad news: given the 80 million plus gallons out there in the Gulf now, it's going to take 160 million pounds of this power to sop up all the oil.  They don't have nearly that much.
Mobius said it has 2 million pounds of the powder in warehouses that could reach the gulf within five days. That amount would soak up about 1 million gallons of oil – or roughly 25,000 barrels, Hennessy said.

The company can produce 1 million pounds every 10 days after that, said its media director Michael Cudahy.
This thing is blasting out at least that much oil per day.  Slurping up the oil into floating bricks of yellow sytrofoam would be a great idea if we had, oh, another 80,000 tons of the stuff.

Still, every bit has to help and it has to be better than allowing this stuff to hit the coast.

I hope.  The really obnoxious part is that we're down to plan Z here on the cleanup, which is "throw everything we have at this crap and pray".  Doesn't the fact we have to rely on this type of technology mean we have to invest far more in safely drilling, and even more than that in getting off oil period?