Where does all the oily water go after it is sucked up by skimmers and booms?
A floating skimmer, lined with a chemical that attracts oil, sucks fuel from the ocean surface and a pump forces the collected liquid into a tanker. The water drops to the bottom of the tank. The water is sucked out from the bottom, and the remaining oil gets pumped into a second tank to repeat the process. After three or four rounds, what’s left is almost 100 percent oil. The purest oil from a spill is a more diluted version of the original. Once separated from the water, refineries can process it for cars, furnaces and the manufacture of milk jugs. Oil that may have weathered or has been contaminated with debris and seawater might be directly deposited in controlled landfills or used in land reclamation and road building. Or it will be burned. What happens to all the oily, hairy pantyhose booms used to soak up oil? The booms can be reused up to 100 times, according to San Francisco’s Matter of Trust and other groups collecting such items. After the hair inside the hose soaks up as mu
