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INTERESTING. It's not an impossible idea, oil and water have different densities which is what a centrifuge does, basically separates different density material, and oil and water are immiscible, which makes it much easier.

There are a few potential problems, maybe.

1) Organic debris (aka stuff killed by oil). Anything swimming around the oil field is going to be dead, lot of it will sink, but at 200 gallons a minute, some of it may get sucked up into the machine. No real problem for the centrifuge, fish and water are both denser than oil, so it's the oil that's going to separate out. But I don't know what the intake or outtake is, debris might get stuck in there.

2) 3% oil concentration is still toxic. Better than it was, but...

3) What do they do with the oil once it's separated out? Do they have to stop and clean out the oil in whatever they have to catch it? We're talking a huge volume of oil. They'll need to streamline this, to keep downtime at a minimum.

4) Corrosiveness of sea water on metal. I have no idea what they've done here to protect the sensitive parts of the machines.

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Costner’s idea sounds interesting; at least the Coast Guard is testing it out, here’s hoping it works and they use it. As for where to put the oil, the obvious answer is those tankers BP has thus far not employed. I’d assume they had some plan for where to put the oil anyway; no sense separating it if you have no place to put it, eh?

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Well, you'd hope, but I've seen a lot of excellent technology like this get stuck on something small and stupid no one thought of. When you have a pumping capacity of 200 gallons per minute, it's unlikely you have a large enough volume reservoir to test the full capacity of the system, and you're not going to go out to the ocean, dump a bunch of pollution in an area, then test it out at full capacity. I also doubt that any of their test runs dealt with this sheer quantity of pollution and where to store it once it's separated.

If the separator can separate salts for the water (which it might be able to), they might have done that, and tested and sampled to see how clean the resulting water was... There's just not a lot I know about their system. But like I said, it is actually a good idea.

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