After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, cleanup crews couldn't extract oil in freezing water. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute crowdsourced the problem in 2007, and a construction chemist named John Davis solved it in six weeks by adapting a vibrating device from cement chutes. The lesson: reframe your problem to find answers outside your industry.
Questions this video answers
10.8 million gallons
Prince William Sound, Alaska
32 degrees (Fahrenheit) hard-stated as '32 degrees' in the transcript
Oil Spill Recovery Institute
Innocentive
Chapters
In the last video, I talked about the Deep Water Horizon oil rig explosion. Today I want to talk about a different one from 1989. This is the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And for those of you who remember, 10.8 million gallons of oil seeped into the icy waters of Prince William Sound in Alaska. And cleanup crews tried everything possible to try to extract the oil water mixture. Unfortunately, because the oil water mixture was dense and it was in cold temperatures, 32 degrees, every time they tried to extract the oil water mixture, it would freeze. For two decades. They had experts in oil trying to solve the problem of how do we prevent an oil water mixture from freezing? And they got nowhere. Ultimately, in 2007, a non profit called the Oil Spill Recovery Institute took a stab at it. What they realized is maybe the problem has nothing to do with oil. Maybe it has nothing specifically to do with temperature. Maybe it's a common issue in fluid dynamics called viscous shearing. Without getting too technical, basically what that means is any dense liquid put under a force or acceleration, if you try to extract it, its molecules could seize up. So using the platform Innocentive, they posted a challenge. How do we prevent viscous shearing in a dense liquid? And over the course of six weeks, not two decades, but over the course of six weeks, they found a solution. And guess what? That solution did not come from somebody in the oil industry. The solution actually came from a guy by the name of John Davis, a chemist who works in the construction industry. In particular, one of the things he worked with was wet cement. And if the chute of a cement truck didn't have the right cement water mixture, the molecules could seize, they could freeze. And he created this device that would sit on top of a cement chute and would vibrate the molecules. To prevent this seizing, John took his prize, flew to Alaska, took his device, tweaked it, and doing that, he solved a two decade old problem. When they tried to solve the problem, how do we prevent oil water mixture from freezing? They didn't get a solution. But when they changed to something different, they got a fundamentally different solution in very rapid time. In the next installment, I will talk about the Goldilocks principle as a means of framing better questions.
