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Experts say oil company spent $16m on actor’s oil-water separation machines and gave top priority to testing his devices BP spent $16m (£10m) on an oil spill clean-up machine pitched by actor Kevin Costner at the height of last year’s Gulf of Mexico disaster – even though the machines failed their initial field tests. In the week of the one-year anniversary of the capping of the well, it has emerged that the oil company gave top priority to testing the devices – ahead of the 123,000 other suggestions from the public for plugging the well and scooping up more the millions of gallons of crude from deep water, marshes and beaches. However, technical experts in charge of sifting through those public ideas said Costner’s oil-water separator did not show particular promise. The device, a centrifuge designed to spin contaminated water through a cylinder to separate the oil, became gummed up by the thick, heavily weathered crude that was a defining feature of the BP spill. It was also not a particularly new technology, the experts said. The actor vigorously promoted the centrifuges after last year’s oil disaster , which followed the April 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig , which killed 11 workers. In an appearance before Congress in June last year, Costner said he had spent some $24m (£15m) developing the devices since buying a patent from the Department of Energy in the early 1990s. He also told Congress that his devices would have been able to clean up 90% of the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez tanker in less than a week. “It appeared to work in some conditions and did not appear to work in others,” said Kurt Hansen, a technical expert from the US Coast Guard’s research and development centre, who was part of the test team. “My impression from talking to people who have seen it is that it’s not any different than any other separators out there on the market that do the same thing.” Ellen Faurot-Daniels, an expert from California’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response, came to a similar conclusion. “His oil-water separator didn’t work very well on this oil. It was pretty waxy and a lot of oil-water separators had a lot of trouble dealing with it,” she said. “But he was given the opportunity to go back and improve the separator so it would do a better job.” And yet it is widely acknowledged among the scientists and technical experts who worked desperately last summer to plug the well and clean up the oil spewing into the Gulf that Costner went straight to the head of the line when it came to get a hearing from BP. “He was on TV. He was telegenic, and there were enormous amounts of money being spent,” said one government scientist. There is no indication that the preference shown to Costner directly impeded the development of another technology. Costner’s agent and his company, Blue Planet Water Solutions , did not respond to requests for comment. BP has been reluctant to revisit last year’s exercise in crowd sourcing “given the timing [one year after the well was capped]“, a spokesman, Daren Beaudo, said in an email. On the Costner separators, Beado wrote: “Costner’s device is one of the many technologies that were tested and used during the response. We appreciate all of the ideas that were submitted during this unprecedented response event.” It took three attempts before technical experts could see the centrifuges in action. The first attempt to deploy the centrifuges was called off for safety concerns. A second test, overseen by a senior vice-president from BP, failed when the pump that was supposed to feed the oiled water into the centrifuge became clogged. “The result of weathering and mixing and dispersant and natural organic matter in the ocean created a very very stable water and oil emulsion which had a viscosity like peanut butter,” said Eric Hoek, an associate professor of environmental engineering who took leave from his post at UCLA to work as a consultant to Costner’s company. The gooey thick substance simply could not be siphoned up into the centrifuges for processing. “The pump couldn’t pump it,” Hoek said. “They handed us a material that was not capable of being separated by any separation technology because you couldn’t pump it.” A third test, conducted off Port Jackson, Louisiana on 8 June last year, produced the desired results, Hoek said. The devices did succeed in separating out oil from water – though not quite to the high levels of purity Costner had claimed in his media appearances and before Congress. A week after that successful test, BP ordered 32 centrifuge systems. By the time the well was plugged on 15 July, 21 centrifuge systems had been deployed, with varying degrees of success , said Hoek. “There were days when the vessels collected oil and watery liquid and the centrifuge processed it,” he said. “There were days when the vessel pulled up but it was not processible, it was full of sticks, or peanut butter.” Costner has continued to champion the centrifuges. He visited the Gulf again this April to try to persuade BP and Louisiana parish presidents to invest in a permanent fleet of centrifuge-equipped monster barges , called Big Gulps, that would remain on the ready in case of another spill. The fleet, which Costner likened to an insurance policy for the Gulf, would cost $48m a year. Hoek, meanwhile, maintains that in research since then his team had figured out how to break down the stickiest – peanut-butter-like – oil so it could be pumped into the centrifuges. BP oil spill Oil spills Oil Pollution United States Oil BP Kevin Costner Suzanne Goldenberg guardian.co.uk