Future reference file: Oil cleanup teams win $1.3 million

[a kennedy]

By Alan Boyle

A year and a half after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill sparked a months-long environmental crisis, experts from a cleanup company in Illinois have earned a $1 million prize for coming up with a better way to deal with future spills.

Another team from Norway took the $300,000 second prize in the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, which was organized even as the Gulf oil spill was going on. And wouldn't you know it? Yet another oil-spill crisis is unfolding off the coast of New Zealand, even as the awards are being announced today in New York.

The risks posed by offshore drilling and tanker accidents are what prompted Silicon Valley philanthropist Wendy Schmidt to fund the prize program almost as soon as she was asked. Until fossil fuels can be phased out entirely, there's a crying need for better oil-cleanup technologies.

"We're really playing with fire, and I hope we move beyond this," she told me in an interview before today's ceremony, "But in the meantime, it's very encouraging to see so many people who care about the problem."

The $1.4 million Oil Cleanup X Challenge was organized by the X Prize Foundation, which has also managed two $10 million competitions for private spaceflight and more efficient cars, as well as a $2 million contest for lunar lander prototypes. Several other X Prizes are in the works, including the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize for private-sector moon missions.

The X Prize Foundation's chairman and CEO, Peter Diamandis, said the oil-cleanup challenge sprang out of a suggestion made by film director James Cameron, a member of the foundation's board of trustees.
"It really was a rapid-response X Challenge," Diamandis told me. "The idea that a $1.4 million purse could attract roughly 350 teams to pre-register was really incredible."

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/11/8261445-oil-cleanup-teams-win-13-million