World's Biggest Oil Skimmer Enters the Gulf

(July 1) -- With Hurricane Alex's winds churning up waves in the Gulf of Mexico, there's only one ship believed to be strong enough to keep cleaning up the oil spill there amid stormy seas: the world's biggest oil skimmer.

The Taiwanese-flagged vessel, named "A Whale," is 3 1/2 football fields long and looms 10 stories high. It's outfitted with 12 vents on either side of its bow, which experts hope will be able to suck up as many as 21 million gallons of oil-tainted water each day.

The boat docked Wednesday in Louisiana, where most smaller skimmers have been forced off the water for days because of the threat of rough seas from Hurricane Alex. The Coast Guard is meeting with the big skimmer's owners in anticipation of giving it a whirl as soon as today.

A Whale was originally built as a conventional oil tanker earlier this year in South Korea, but its owner decided to change it into an oil skimmer after the gulf spill. It motored over to Portugal for a refitting, and then made its way across the Atlantic.

"It is absolutely gigantic. It's unbelievable," Ed Overton, an environmental sciences professor at Louisiana State University, told The Associated Press after seeing the ship last week in Norfolk, Va.

Nobu Su, the CEO and founder of TMT Group, the Taiwanese shipping company that owns A Whale, described the boat's technology to a gaggle of reporters and maritime executives last week in Norfolk. He said the vessel would roll across the gulf "like a lawn mower cutting the grass."

"A large-scale disaster needs a large-scale solution," Su said in comments carried by several news outlets.

As the ship motors along, its vents will suck up oily water and transfer it to machines on board that separate the oil from water, Su said. The oil would then be moved to another tanker for disposal, and the water would be released back into the Gulf.

But that technology has never been used or even tested, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will need to sign off on the quality of the water that's being dumped back into the Gulf.

"I don't know whether it's going to work or not, but it certainly needs to be given the opportunity," Overton said.

The Coast Guard, with approval from the EPA, will have final say on whether the ship is cleared for work in the Gulf. Its owners are also negotiating with BP, the British oil company whose rented rig exploded in April, sparking the spill. It's paying for all cleanup operations.

Between 71 million and 139 million gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf since the April 20 explosion that also killed 11 workers. It's the worst-ever oil spill in American history, and it's on track to become the Gulf's worst-ever spill as well.

At the high end of the government's estimated range of the spill's volume, 140 million gallons of oil would exceed the Gulf's worst spill in history -- the record-setting Ixtoc I spill off Mexico's coast from 1979 to 1980.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Alex, which was downgraded to a Category 1 storm over Mexico, has still halted most skimming operations in the Gulf, as well as efforts to lay oil-corraling booms there.

Weather has also delayed the arrival of another ship, the Helix Producer, that BP wanted to use to collect oil siphoned off the undersea leak. Engineers had hoped to connect the ship to the blown-out well using a flexible hose on Wednesday, but the Coast Guard said waters were too choppy to attempt the operation. It's expected to take place next week once the storm passes.

But ships that help burn off oil on the water's surface a mile above the undersea leak are still operating. The drilling of relief wells nearby also continues.