For all this talk of offshore drilling in recent years, it may take a disaster like the one we’re witnessing play out in the Gulf Coast to step up the pace of clean tech investments. As bad as Exxon Valdez was- and officials are already calling this worse- the damage was confined to an area far from the everyday American consciousness. It looked bad- photos of sea birds and beaches covered in oil- and eventually covered 1,300 square miles of ocean, but it didn’t really disrupt ‘business as usual’ here in the U.S., in the way this recent one will in a profound way. Commercial and sport fishing in a large part of the Gulf has been halted, and some reports suggest the oil slick could venture up the East Coast and upset the balance of crude oil prices globally.

What seems like an impossible task, the cleanup (more accurately, the containment) usually involves a number of desperate measures. One technique involves applying dispersants, which can help wave energy break the slick into small oil droplets that dilute and subsequently bio-degrade naturally. Burning the oil slick is another technique, but, as with dispersants, this relies on favorable weather. Mechanical cleanup, the use of booms and skimmers, seems to be the most conventional technique, and BP has hired a massive army of volunteers to help in these efforts.

As our friends at Inhabitat reported last week, there are other less conventional techniques that are showing promise.

A tiny Norwegian company has developed a super absorbent organic peat moss that is capable of cleaning up oil floating on water. The peat is scattered on the spill and absorbs the oil, and, because it doesn’t absorb water, it can then simply be scooped out — taking the toxic oil with it…

The moss hasn’t undergone large-scale marine trials. But maybe we ought to give it — or some other organic material — a whirl before we light the coast of Louisiana on fire.

[Source: Inhabitat]