I recall reading a few years ago that human hair could be used the same way. It seems there are a lot of natural materials that work well for absorbing oil; I'm not sure if this is what's used in the "oil absorbing booms" the Coast Guard's been deploying, but these are made from wood: http://www.clear-passage.com/absorb.html#anchor799344.
As a side note, I think it's cool that this was presented by a guy with a Southern (US) accent and overalls. Hopefully this will do some small part to breaking the stereotype that people with a Southern accent are not intelligent.
Also think about what you'd do with the hay once you manage to somehow collect it. You'd have all this hazardous waste that you'd have to end up burying or burning.
Sounds like the existing boats + tools they have work fine for cleaning it up, it's just a matter of scale. The real problem is that the leak is huge, and there's just craploads of oil to clean up.
Granted, this is on a massive scale that I have a hard time even imagining...but Paul Stamets has shown phenomenal results using oyster mushrooms to do mycoremediation.
Simple solutions are quite often the best. I do not see a problem with this as it does make perfect sense. Oil floats but is not a solid and hay is a very textured solid that would affix itself to oil pretty strongly (think getting oil on your hands vs on a pane of glass).
From what I read somewhere (I think it was posted here, but I can't find it at the moment), a large amount of the oil is suspended in the water beneath the surface.
Huh? I can't find that anywhere. I can only find that it's traveling beneath the booms put in place to contain the oil (probably due to waves/volume).
Oil is low density and by nature floats. Oil is non-polar while water is polar (so they naturally separate). This isn't some magical oil spill - it has the same rules as pouring vegetable oil into a glass of water and stirring it.
I'm interested in what could cause oil to be suspended beneath something more dense (water). Perhaps it is just taking longer to reach the surface due to currents?
Well, it's not like it's going to go straight up. Keep in mind that if you pour vegetable oil into water and stir it vigorously enough, some of it will go beneath the water (admittedly, it won't dissolve into it or anything, it'll remain in big globules). A lot of oil is below the surface due to the sheer volume coming out (and yes, currents carrying it around :)).
In one of the videos the guy mentioned that back in the 90's there was a reason that A LOT of hay needed to be sent to Montana or some other state in the northern midwest. He used that as an argument for why they could get enough hay. Does anyone know anything about that? I have been unsuccessful in my search on google.
I think it could be related to drought conditions (or, perhaps flooding) where the hay harvest failed. Google "hay drought midwest south" etc and you will see that hay has gone both ways a few times over the past decades. A list for farmers/others to share info about supply / demand is at http://www.haylist.umn.edu/
Did you watch the video? They suggested using fishing nets to gather the hay, bringing it to lined dumpsters at beaches and ports and then using it in incinerators with woodchips/etc to get energy from it.
Who knows if it would work out that well, but that's the idea.
The idea has potential, and it's certainly worth experimenting with while the opportunity is there. This will not be the last oil spill. If BP, DOE, and MMS were smart, they would slip these guys a few hundred thousand to a couple of million in funding to do some prototype testing in the field under realistic conditions.
I think we should take the annual salary of the managers who engineered, inspected and owned and operated the rig, convert it into dollar bills and use that to soak it up.
I'd like to see this work but seriously this demo is far too simple, show me a demo with a few hundred square feet with very light oil densities and much less hay available.
As a side note, I think it's cool that this was presented by a guy with a Southern (US) accent and overalls. Hopefully this will do some small part to breaking the stereotype that people with a Southern accent are not intelligent.