Jun 5 2010
Abanaki Corporation said today that its patent-pending Fuzzy2™ material is proving highly effective at removing floating oil from the waters off the coast of Louisiana as part of the Gulf oil spill clean-up. The new material is being used on a disk oil skimmer made by CRUCIAL Inc. and has triple the oil removal capacity of standard disk skimmer material.
According to Abanaki president Tom Hobson, oil skimmers using the Fuzzy2 material are ideal for the core clean-up task in the Gulf, removing floating oil from water. Some other clean-up activities, however, are leading to the creation of tar balls, a far different and more difficult clean-up task. The skimmers being deployed in the Gulf cannot be used for picking up the tar balls that are being produced as a by-product of some of the industry's clean-up efforts.
Clean-up activities that create tar balls "may in fact be making the disaster worse," Hobson said.
Unlike other oil skimmer disk materials, Fuzzy2 has a hairy surface that greatly increases its surface area, making it highly efficient at removing oil from the water's surface.
The Deepwater Horizon oil well is gushing thousands of barrels of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico following an explosion that killed 11 workers April 21.