Inventor Zapping Oil Spills With Dry Ice

It all started with the Huntington Beach oil spill in 1990, when Tim Beck stood on the beach watching a black tide of crude oil heading into shore.

“It just kept getting closer and closer (to the beach)), and nobody showed up to save the day,” says Beck, 45, a Manhattan Beach inventor and, to make ends meet, an El Segundo substitute science teacher. “I started thinking there had to be some way to stop an oil spill.”

Then it came to him. Why not use massive heat extraction? In other words, why not freeze the oil? Turn the liquid oil spill into a frozen oil spill--an “oilberg” as Beck calls it. Then you could simply pluck the chunks of oil right off the water.

Beck’s first idea for freezing oil spills was to use liquid nitrogen, which at nearly minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit is plenty cold enough to freeze oil or almost anything else. Only problem was, it’s so cold that it might also freeze the oil-spill workers along with the oil. He had to scratch that idea.

Then Beck thought about using frozen carbon dioxide--that is, dry ice--as the heat extraction agent. The only problem was that oil experts said dry ice, at minus 109 degrees Fahrenheit, isn’t cold enough to freeze crude oil. Beck discovered that it was indeed cold enough, once the gases contained in crude oil dissipated into the air.

Finally Beck found a company in Rancho Cucamonga, Alpheus Cleaning Technologies, that manufactures dry ice pellets for “ice blasting,” which is like sandblasting except that dry ice is used. For about 15 cents a pound, the company sells dry ice pellets about an eighth of an inch long and about the thickness of spaghetti--small enough to float, big enough to freeze oil.

Beck started taking his idea to oil companies, seeking financing to continue the experiments. But he had a hard time finding backers.

Eventually, though, Beck says he found an oil company that put about $50,000 into his research program. He put another $20,000 of his own money into it.

The results were encouraging, Beck says. During one experiment he managed to create a 500-pound “oilberg,” demonstrating the feasibility of the process on bigger-than-a-mud puddle spills.