As cleanup suggestions pour in, BP pays little heed

A constituent of Sen. Mike Enzi's makes a product from beetle-killed pine trees that soaks up oil like crazy, but the man can't get BP to listen to his ideas. What's happened to his suggestions?

"They've been lost," the Wyoming Republican complained at a hearing two weeks ago.

The pine-tree product was one of about 120,000 ideas BP says it has received recently. Its proponent is one of many to express frustration by the company's apparent lack of response.

John Rexholm, 57, a Swedish naval architect living in Germany, has an idea for hooding the blown-out Gulf of Mexico well and directing the oil up to the surface. He sent it to BP. A month later, he got three e-mail replies in a day: one asked for more information, another said a similar idea was being considered and a third advised, "Your idea cannot be applied under the very challenging ... conditions we face."

Donald LaFond, 48, a contractor in Sudbury, Ontario, is sure the device he invented eight years ago to crack rock without dynamite could seal the Deepwater Horizon well. He has spent six weeks trying to get someone to listen.

Dwayne Spradlin, head of the Internet-based problem-solving network InnoCentive, put out a call for ideas April 30. About 2,500 people answered. On June 19, BP said it would not proceed with any of those suggestions because an agreement with InnoCentive would be "too complex and burdensome."

"Our network is incredibly disenchanted in BP's lack of interest in outside solutions," Spradlin said.

That pretty much summarizes the view of thousands of other people.

Thanks to the crowd-sourcing potential of the Internet, seafloor-to-Gulf-shore video and the water-torture failure of BP to stop the leak, the Deepwater Horizon disaster has become a personal challenge to scientists, engineers and basement inventors.

Loads of ideas

As of Friday, 119,611 technological suggestions had been sent or routed to BP's offices in Houston, coming in at a rate of about 4,000 a day. The Coast Guard's Research and Development Center had gotten about 3,000 submittals. Most proposed ways to stop the leak or clean up the oil. Some suggested products. Others offered services.

BP says it is looking at all ideas, which range from two-sentence e-mails to fully engineered proposals. They include digital photos of drawings on whiteboards and a crayoned idea from a 9-year-old boy in Virginia.

"The passion is just extraordinary," said Michael Cortez, a petroleum engineer who manages the Alternative Response Technology team at BP. But the reality is that nearly all are impossible or impractical.

"There are not a lot of novel ideas that we don't already have a lot of minds thinking of at the same time," Cortez said.

More than 46,000 of BP's submissions (about 40 percent of the total) address cleaning up the oil, Cortez said. Of that number, 392 have moved to testing, and nine field tests have been completed.

BP's other big task, "securing the leak at the source," has attracted 60 percent of the responses, but fewer than three dozen have moved to testing.

Of the approximately 3,000 ideas in the Coast Guard suggestion box, only 11 had been identified as "technologically feasible" and sent up the line for further consideration. Of the 1,972 that fell into the "oil-wellhead-control" category, only one made the cut.

The low pass rate is almost certainly the product of a naiveté about what BP is confronting.

Problem of pressure

"The enormous pressure and temperature conditions at the bottom of the ocean are hard to imagine," said Patrick Little, professor of engineering at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. "Even experienced engineers, when they start thinking about what happens there, are out of their range of experience."

The 310 people who submitted ideas through the Principal Investigators Association, which helps academic scientists manage their labs and grants, were definitely not experienced in deep-sea engineering.

There was biochemist Richard Gronostajski, whose idea was to "drop a Dewar flask of liquid nitrogen down and pump liquid nitrogen around the pipe until it freezes and then cap it."

And pediatrician Ben Gaston, whose suggestion, based on a cardiology procedure, began: "Spring load a 3 ft-diameter flat umbrella (spokes on the outside, steel mesh between the spokes) around the end of a mile-long cable, with a titanium sheath on the outside. ... "

Neither of those ideas is in the running because BP is wary of plugging or sealing the top of the well as long as pressures remain so high. It was because of concerns about pressure that the top-kill procedure was stopped, according to an engineer with knowledge of the decision-making who spoke on condition of anonymity.