2 ex-NFL stars push Whitefish company's technology to help clean BP oil spill
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By JOE NICKELL of the Missoulian | Posted: Sunday, June 13, 2010 5:45 am | No Comments Posted
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buy this photo Chad Wold, from left, Dennis McGuire and Drew Bledsoe stand in front of an Ozonix system, which is designed to remove oil from water. Courtesy photo
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Two former star NFL quarterbacks with ties to a Whitefish-based company say they have the technology to clean up the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, without the use of any chemicals.
Whether they'll get a chance to prove that claim depends on whether oil giant British Petroleum will fork over the money to deploy the technology - and whether the company decides to trust Troy Aikman and Drew Bledsoe over their primary competitor, actor Kevin Costner.
If politics make strange bedfellows, ecological disaster apparently makes even stranger competitors.
"I know it sounds unusual," said Chad Wold, general counsel and managing member for Ecosphere Energy Services, a Whitefish-based company that has developed a nonchemical treatment system specifically built for removing oil and chemicals from water.
"But BP was talking about using ping-pong balls and pom-poms to clean up the oil, so we feel they should at least consider this technology that has been proven to work already."
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Several years ago, Wold, together with Bledsoe (who lives part-time in Whitefish) and Aikman, provided the investment capital to start Ecosphere Energy Services, a subsidiary of Ecosphere Technologies of Florida. The new company, based in Whitefish and run by part-time resident Dennis McGuire, set out to build a system that could clean the toxic metals-laced wastewater that is produced in the process of drilling new oil wells.
Today, the company's Ozonix system is used at drilling sites around the country.
The system, which takes up an entire 53-foot truck trailer, employs a combination of ozone, ultrasound and high-voltage electricity to separate oil, gas and other contaminants from water through a process known as sonoluminescence.
"The water that comes out at the end of the process is cleaner than bottled drinking water," said Wold. "And the oil is pure enough that they can truck it up and sell it."
The Ozonix system has already been deployed to help out in past ecological disasters. In the days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast in 2005, Ecosphere sent one of its Ozonix systems to Waveland, Miss. Operators stuck an intake hose into the city's sewer system, and produced 70,000 gallons of fresh drinking water every day for area residents.
Wold said the company already has enough of the machines to completely handle the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.
"If this machine was out there right now, there would not be any continuous leakage" said Wold, noting that one Ozonix system can process more than a million gallons of contaminated water a day.
Experts believe that the ruptured well at the floor of the Gulf of Mexico may be spewing as much as 2.1 million gallons of crude oil per day.
"With the machines we already have deployed around the country, we absolutely have enough capacity to take care of it all," said Wold.
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To those ends, Ecosphere announced last week that it had signed a partnership agreement with Mid-Gulf Recovery Services, a disaster-recovery company that has the tankers and off-shore platforms needed to put Ozonix machinery out into the Gulf.
However, deploying and running those Ozonix systems is not cheap. Therein lies the rub.
"The next step is for BP to take a serious look at what we have to offer," said Wold. "It's not one of these things that's free to operate. We need BP to step up to the plate and start paying for technology to put these machines out there."
Convincing BP to spend money on the Ozonix system may have gotten a bit more difficult early last week, when actor Kevin Costner, owner of a company called Oil Therapy Solutions, told the U.S. House Energy and Environment Subcommittee that his company's own, competing system - which employs a system somewhat like a centrifuge to separate oil from water - had been successfully tested by BP.
In the wake of those tests, Costner said BP has ordered an additional 32 systems from Oil Therapy Solutions to deploy in the Gulf.
But Wold, Bledsoe and Aikman have yet another celebrity on their side: Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of legendary oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and president of the Ocean Futures Society.
On Wednesday, Cousteau offered his endorsement of the Ozonix system.
"In the Gulf of Mexico today we are faced with a disaster of unprecedented magnitude to our precious seas, shoreline and marine environment," said Cousteau in a news release announcing his endorsement. "We must embrace nonchemical solutions like the Ecosphere Ozonix technology to clean up the damage as soon as possible. I will summon my entire environmental network and capabilities to help this effort and work tirelessly with Ecosphere until the job is completed."
However it comes out, Wold said his hope is that BP will begin investing money in proven technology rather than untested ideas to solve the crisis in the Gulf, which has already earned the dubious distinction as the largest oil spill in American history.
"Out here in Montana, it's hard for us to comprehend how bad this really is," said Wold, sketching out the scale of the spill in terms that should give locals a sense of its magnitude: "If the epicenter of this spill was in Kalispell, it'd stretch east to Browning, up to Waterton, over to Spokane, Bonners Ferry, to Missoula. If you can imagine living in the midst of that and having your livelihood covered in an oil slick, it's terrible.
"I hope and pray for the citizens of the Gulf that BP takes a hard look at this technology and starts using it."
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