The sheen is the easy part.
Everything visible from a helicopter has an established answer and an organisation that owns it. What sits below the surface, and what the whole event does to the oxygen in the water, has neither.
Spill response is one of the better-drilled disciplines in the maritime industry. Booms, skimmers, sorbents, in-situ burning, shoreline cleanup, a command structure and an exercise schedule. None of that needs replacing and we are not offering to replace it.
What that inventory is built around is oil you can see. Contain the slick, recover as much of it as weather and sea state allow, protect the shoreline, clean what lands. It is the right architecture for the visible fraction and it has decades of practice behind it.
Two things fall outside it. The first is what has left the surface — droplets and dissolved fractions moving in the column, deliberately in the case of dispersant use, and inevitably in the case of a long release in a moving sea. The second is oxygen.
The oxygen nobody has a form for
Hydrocarbon in water gets consumed, and the consuming is done by microbes that breathe. A large release, warm water and a still basin combine into a demand on dissolved oxygen that the water was not holding spare capacity for.
The reference points are worth keeping in view. NOAA treats dissolved oxygen below 2 mg/L as hypoxia — too low for most aquatic life. A Delaware River Basin Commission literature review concludes that sensitive estuarine species need 4 to 6.4 mg/L, which is well above the line that merely defines hypoxia. So water can clear the regulatory threshold and still be killing things. That is how a fish kill arrives days after the cameras have gone.
No spill response plan we have read contains an oxygen line item. That is the gap the vent side of this system was built into.
Where a ChemSlayer hull actually goes
- Clear of the recovery footprint Mechanical recovery works the thickest material and keeps priority. A treatment hull operating inside that footprint is in the way, so it is not there.
- Drawing from where the fraction actually sits Once the bulk is off, the intake takes water carrying dissolved and dispersed hydrocarbon and the oxidation stage works on it inside the hull. Not on a slick outside it. Slower and far less photogenic than skimming, and it is where the long tail of an incident lives.
- Against a discharge standard agreed before mobilisation A spill is the moment when the temptation to push an oxidant harder is strongest. So bromate is prevented at source rather than looked for later, and the water released is held at or below 10 micrograms per litre, read where it leaves the hull. Oxidative work on oil runs as batch hold-and-verify: treat a defined batch, hold it aboard, confirm it in a laboratory, then release it or carry it off. That makes the duty batch-limited rather than continuous, which is worth knowing before it turns up in a daily situation report instead of a contract. And the limit does not move because a minister is asking.
- On the oxygen, for as long as it takes The oxygen duty is accounted the other way round, and deliberately so. Treated water leaves enriched, carrying a nanobubble cloud that spreads through the surrounding water for hours to days — that dispersal is the intended mechanism, where the oxidant side takes no credit for dispersal at all. This phase runs after the oxidation duty and usually outlasts it. It is what protects whatever survived the event.
- With a record the inquiry can read Every pass logged with position, time, method, dose and result. A serious release is followed by a serious investigation, and improvised documentation ages badly.
What a removal figure would require
No removal percentage is quoted here. Nobody has run this class of equipment against a real marine release at scale and published the result, and a figure produced any other way is a laboratory number wearing a hard hat.
Some of a release is a poor target whatever turns up to work it. Emulsified mousse and tarballs carry heavy oxidant demand, treat badly, and are not recovered mechanically by anything on this hull. A commander who has been oversold once buys from whoever says that first.
Nor is a release recoverable in the sense the word usually implies. The figure generally attached to Deepwater Horizon is roughly 4.9 million barrels, released across the 87 days before the well was capped, and it reaches this page through general reference material rather than a government release we have opened ourselves. Nothing on any hull was going to make that event fine.
What it did establish is the shape of the downside. BP's own filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission records a cumulative pre-tax charge of $67.0 billion by the end of 2018, covering response, the 2012 agreement with the US government, the 2016 consent decree with the United States and five Gulf states, and the litigation around all of it. That is one incident, on one company's income statement, over eight years.
A treatment vessel does not move a number of that size. It is the scale against which pre-agreed response capacity gets priced, which is a different argument and a smaller one.
Response capacity is also not a substitute for prevention. A tanker that does not hole is worth more than every treatment vessel in this network put together.
For spill responders and commanders
Capacity is only useful if it was contracted before the phone rang.
The worst moment to negotiate a technical service agreement is hour six of an incident, with a unified command already standing.
What works better is a named capability inside an existing response plan: agreed activation route, agreed discharge standard for the water body, agreed reporting format, agreed position in the tactical sequence relative to recovery assets.
That is a dull document to write in a calm year and an enormously valuable one to already have. It also forces the argument about the discharge standard to happen with a regulator at the table rather than over a radio.
In a port programme the same hull covers this alongside ballast duty and summer dissolved-oxygen work, which is generally how it becomes affordable for anyone who is not a national oil company.
Boundaries
Four boundaries on the response scope.
These four go into the response plan in writing, before a hull is written into a tactical sequence.
- Not a replacement for containment and recovery. Booms and skimmers take the bulk and keep tactical priority throughout.
- Not a dispersant. Nothing at all is put into open water — affected water comes aboard and comes back treated. Pushing hydrocarbon out of sight is the opposite of the objective here.
- Not a shoreline capability. Oiled rock, sand and marsh are worked by people on foot with a completely different playbook.
- Not a liability shield. Treatment does not reduce anyone's obligations under a spill regime.
Asked by response planners
Three direct ones
Is this an alternative to booms and skimmers?
No. Mechanical containment and recovery take the bulk of a release and keep tactical priority throughout.
What recovery cannot lift is drawn aboard and broken down inside the hull. Then the oxygen the event stripped out goes back.
Is this a dispersant by another name?
No. A dispersant's job is to break a slick into droplets that enter the water column. That is its purpose and also its cost, and it is a decision made by regulators for good reasons.
Nothing at all is put into open water here. Affected water is taken in, treated aboard and returned, which is the opposite trade: the column is where the problem ends up, not where anything should be sent.
How quickly can you be on scene?
It depends on fleet position, port clearance and who already holds command of the incident.
Which is the argument for settling activation routes, the discharge standard and reporting formats in a calm month rather than an ugly one. Capacity that has to be procured mid-incident usually arrives after it would have mattered.
Before the incident
Put this in the plan while nothing is burning.
Tell Alarivean which water body your response plan covers, who holds command, and what the plan currently says about the water column and about dissolved oxygen. The gap is usually obvious within a page.