Announced May 21, 2010, scientists for Safe and Bound have been inventing a new environmentally friendly technology to clean and recycle spilled crude oil.
The technology absorbs oil and turns it into a buoyant oil cake that could then be harvested from the sea. Once the material is harvested, the process can be reversed to free the oil.
The technology that has proven successful in laboratory tests using sea water and crude, soon to be tested in the Gulf of Mexico, is called Floatable Porosive Particulate Matter [for Treatment of Oil Spills]. This Floatable Porosive Particulate Matter maintains perpetual buoyancy of crude oil on the surface of water using hydrophobic and porosive materials, which prevents settling to the bottom of the ocean, that allow for control of the oil spill for harvesting.
As an environmentally friendly method of cleaning up the oil spill without damaging the marine eco-system, the reclamation of oil would prove to be a savior of Big Oil in protecting against the loss and additional spending in filtering the would be contaminated crude.