Deepwater Solutions

Patent Pending

Hydro Quip, Inc. a designer and manufacturer of oil water separator systems introduces their deep water oil spill response solution for containing, separating and recovering large amounts of oil that has spilled or leaked into the ocean.

Large volume cleanups require large equipment that can stay on station removing pollutant. The equipment must be easy to use, rapidly deployable and efficient. Our method employs a standard ocean going barge used to transport fluids from oil and gas platforms back to land. Many of these exist and are in service everyday moving spent drilling fluids and drill cuttings from the ocean to land based disposal operations.

Our design converts several ocean barges into API oil water separators that can remain in the plume and separate large amounts of oil at high flow rates. Ocean barges are generally divided into four compartments: Two large deep compartments, fore and aft (these will function as the separation compartments), and two smaller center or wing compartments (these will function as the clean water pump out compartments). You fill the barge with clean salt water; several small boats pump the oil water mixture over the side of the barge. Based on the surface‐loading rate, oil will rise to the top and displace the seawater into the center compartments through the modification (added down tubes). The center compartments are your clean water compartments, through which clean water can be pumped back into the ocean. Once a layer of oil builds on the surface of the water in the separation compartment of the barge, it can be pumped into a separate boat for further processing.

Once cleanup is complete, the barge can return to its intended purpose. An API Separator is nothing more than a settling tank that retains the oil/water mixture and allows the oil to rise to the surface based on retention time and the difference in specific gravity of seawater and crude oil. The oil water separation theory, which has been practiced since 1948 (API 421) is calculated on the oil globules vertical velocity and its relationship to the surface‐loading rate of the separator. The rise rate is the velocity at which oil particles move toward the surface of the separator.