If the Federal authorities in the US would get off their arse there is a ship available that could help skim up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Fittingly it is called the “A Whale” and it is a massive ship 340m long and 60m wide with a draught of 11.3m.
A massive, newly-retooled supertanker that its owner claims could skim millions of gallons of oily water a day is now in the Gulf of Mexico, where government and BP officials intend to run tests shortly to see if it actually works.
With residents of four states complaining about the dearth of skimming vessels off their shores, the 10-story tall, 372-yard long Taiwanese-owned behemoth — called A Whale — could be an enormous boon to the region.
Or it could be a really, really big disappointment.
Nobu Su, the CEO and founder of Taiwan Maritime Transport (TMT), told reporters in Norfolk on Friday that on account of the special holes he had cut in its sides, his vessel would roll across the Gulf “like a lawn mower cutting the grass.”
Though the ship and the process are entirely untested, Su insisted A Whale could ingest and process some 15 million gallons of oily water a day. By comparison, the entire emergency response since BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20 has collected 28 million gallons of oily water.
