Kevin Costner is making big news these days but this time it has nothing to do with his career in the film industry. The “Field of Dreams” actor is hoping that his oil separator invention can help clean up the massive oil spill that is currently ruining the Gulf of Mexico and the beaches and land masses that surround it. Costner is very confident in his invention and believes that it’s not too late to put it into action.
Last week, the “Dances with Wolves” star spoke in front of the House Subcommittee on Environment about the tool he invested over $20 million of his own money and 15 years of his time in:
“This is a technology that I believe has the potential to fight catastrophic oil spills… These will serve as the first line of defense in the oil spill clean up and recovery. Am I up here hawking my product? I guess… Don’t take mine, take somebody else’s because I’ve been to all these oil-response conventions… and all I see are boons and the latest helicopter, but I’ve never seen one machine that deals with getting the oil out. That’s me.”
Early predictions say that the disaster, which has been going on for nearly 60 days, has already caused anywhere between 20 and 47 million gallons of oil to leak into the Gulf of Mexico. BP has already purchased 32 of the filtration machines manufactured by the movie star’s Costner Industries Nevada Corporation and is retesting the machine in hopes of getting it to the Gulf really soon.
The device is said to be able to separate 99% of oil from water and recycle up to 2,000 barrels per day. And Costner hopes that his machine can help fix this particular incident, along with preventing big accidents like this from happening in the future.
“That oil’s going to keep coming towards those people,” Costner said on Good Morning America this week. “That well has not stopped. So we have to be out at the source, sucking it up on some major, I mean, we have to treat it a little bit like a war. We mustered logistically everything we had to get the Beaches of Normandy. We have to muster everything we can to keep it from hitting our beaches.
“… [W]e know accidents are going to happen. But if we’re going to operate on our high seas, we have to have– we have to have this equipment there and … it should be able to operate the minute the oil comes into contact with water.”
Let’s hope the Costner’s machine can fix this!! That oil spill gets worse every day and even when they do stop the leak, it’s gonna take a while to get it all cleaned up. So let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that Kevin Costner’s machine does its job AND THEN some…
