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
- Behind the recovery line 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.
- On the column, once the bulk is off The oxidation stage acts on dissolved and dispersed hydrocarbon in the water rather than on a slick. This is slower, less photogenic work than skimming and it is where the long tail of an incident lives.
- Under a bounded oxidant ceiling Seawater ozonation makes bromate if nobody stops it, and a spill is exactly the moment when the temptation to over-dose is strongest. The site ceiling is set before mobilisation and it does not move because a minister is asking.
- On the oxygen, for as long as it takes Reoxygenation through the affected column runs after the oxidation duty and typically outlasts it. This is the phase that protects what 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 we will not tell you
We will not give you a removal percentage. 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.
We will not tell you a spill is recoverable. US government scientific teams put Deepwater Horizon at roughly 4.9 million barrels released before the well was capped, 87 days after the blowout. Nothing on any hull was going to make that event fine.
What that event 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.
We are not going to pretend a treatment vessel moves a number of that size. We raise it because it is the only honest scale against which to judge what pre-agreed response capacity costs — and because the operators who have read that filing are the ones who take the water column seriously.
And we will not sell response capacity as 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 dose ceiling 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 oxidant limits 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 things this is not.
Response organisations are rightly suspicious of new equipment arriving with broad claims. Here are the limits, before anybody asks.
- Not a replacement for containment and recovery. Booms and skimmers take the bulk and keep tactical priority throughout.
- Not a dispersant. Nothing is added to the water except gas, and moving hydrocarbon out of sight into the column 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 and we would not want a client to imagine it does.
Asked by response planners
Three direct ones
Is this an alternative to booms and skimmers?
No, and any supplier suggesting otherwise has never stood on a response vessel.
Mechanical recovery takes the bulk of a release. This works the fraction recovery cannot reach, and then puts oxygen back into water the event has stripped of it.
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 is added here except gas. The working position is that the column is where the problem ends up, not where it ought to 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, dose ceilings 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, not during
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.