Halfmoon Bay entrepreneur David Skene has caught BP's attention with his newly-developed oil skimmer, which he says can pick up 98 per cent of spilled oil.
Skene said BP confirmed this week that it will dispatch two company representatives to Sechelt over the next couple weeks to have a look at his device, which Skene says will update current oil clean-up technologies by 30 years.
"We want to show [BP] there is technology out there - that there are new ways of recovering oil from oil spills," Skene said, stating that he's "100 per cent confident" in his oil skimmer's capacities.
Skene, who runs BlueWave Marine Innovations, said the April 20 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the ensuing catastrophic oil spill jump-started his project. Since then, he's worked with marine engineer John Dearden and marine technician and boat builder Dan McPherson of Dearden Marine in Gibsons to build a prototype skimmer. The team officially launched the oil skimmer in Porpoise Bay on Friday, Aug. 13, and have been running it through mechanical testing for the past couple weeks.
But Skene, a keen boater, said that while the project took off this spring, he's actually been working on the idea for a couple years.
"Working on one of my boats down at the marina, I noticed that on a lot of older boats, the bilge pumps just puke out oil," he recounts. "And it was quite a bit of oil, and I thought, 'There's got to be some way to clean it up' - and I started coming up with ideas."
Skene said the skimmer he's developed is an oil and water separator.
"What it does is it actually picks up the oil and separates it and sheds off the water, and then the oil's gathered into storage tanks," he said.
The company website notes that the separator uses a self-propelled mechanism with an oil-absorbing membrane that wicks oil or diesel fuel from both salt and fresh water. The website identifies oil spill recovery companies, along with harbour and marina operators, as the company's target market for the new oil skimmer.
Skene said he originally contacted BP about the skimmer and that, since then, the company has been tracking his project's development "very closely" through the company blog at www.bluewavemarine.blogspot.com.
Skene said he's been impressed with the proactive way in which the company is searching out new technologies to respond to spills.
"Everybody has accidents and it was an accident that happened to BP," he said. "And now they're looking into the future to prevent this from happening. They're actually looking at new technology, and I have to give them credit for that - I really, really do."
