Oil freezing plan met with cold shoulder
Tim Beck is accustomed to getting nowhere with the government.
For months he appeared before the Hermosa Beach City Council to push for limited beach nudity, and to explain that beach sand could be frozen to prevent its migration to other shores. Council members listened obligingly and treated him respectfully, but the beachgoers remain clothed and the sand remains unfrozen.
Now, with mind-numbing quantities of undersea oil hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico, Beck has been trying in vain to impress federal and state officials with another plan he has discussed locally – to use dry ice to freeze massive chunks of spilled oil into “oilbergs,” which could be scooped up with nets and barged away.
Beck, a 61-year-old former high school science teacher, first got the freezing idea as he watched a Huntington Beach oil spill in 1990, and three years later he landed a $50,000 contract from an oil company to conduct experiments to weigh its practicality. The company was dissolved and the project went no further, but Beck said he verified that fuel oil could be frozen to the consistency of Swiss cheese.
To conduct his experiments, Beck persuaded Body Glove cofounder Bob Meistrell to take him out to the “Redondo seep” — where small amounts of oil ooze from the ocean floor — aboard the 70-foot yacht The Disappearance.
“He almost ruined my paint job,” said Meistrell with a laugh, adding that he had to use gasoline to clean the oil off The Disappearance hull.
Beck presented the oil-freezing plan to officials of oil companies and government agencies with no luck, and renewed his efforts upon news of the Gulf tragedy, but again the freezing idea got the cold shoulder.
He said officials have expressed environmental concerns over carbon dioxide emissions, and he believes that they rarely want to risk applying new methods to old problems.
“They don’t want to try something new and be laughed at,” Beck said. “They would rather fail.”
Expert opinion
Beck’s notion received serious treatment when Easy Reader presented it to Professor Iraj Ershaghi, director of petroleum engineering at USC.
“The concept works for removing oil spills on sand and water as long as the economics are taken into consideration, and operations are done rapidly before evaporation of dry ice,” Ershaghi wrote in an e-mail.
Ershaghi has been reviewing lay people’s opinions on capping and cleaning the oil gusher for the British Broadcasting Corporation, posting as resident expert on a Web page called “Oil Spill – Your Solutions,” on the site bbc.co.uk.
A second petroleum engineering expert at USC advised that the large body of water around the Gulf oil would make a freezing operation difficult, and questioned whether enough dry ice could be found for an effective operation.
Beck said it would work like this: pellets of dry ice the size of a person’s thumbnail, which are sold in industrial volumes, would be dropped onto the oil as it rises to the surface of the water, causing the pellets to burrow into the oil and harden it.
“It clumps up,” he said. “That’s the beauty of the oilberg.”
Fishing nets would be thrown over the iced oil, and cranes would be used to lift it onto barges.
Beck said workers at the Gulf would be spared the benzene-laced fumes of unfrozen oil, and the frozen oil could be recycled, or even reused if it is fresh enough.
He also said that the shorelines of Gulf states could be protected using 50-pound blocks of dry ice strung together like a necklace. Fishing boats would haul around the dry ice necklaces to herd the oil from the shore.
Creeping out Al
Beck cares for his 95-year-old mother and cannot go to the Gulf, but he has contacted numerous state and federal officials, including the president’s chief of staff and the vice president. He aims high.
“I’ve asked them to put me in charge of salvage efforts,” he said. “I don’t want to be in charge of the spill.”
He said he’s gotten nowhere, and in the past, his efforts have earned more than just a polite brush-off. Some years ago Beck said he was “invited to the federal building” on Wilshire Boulevard “to get my photo taken, get my fingerprints taken,” after he proposed a method to “freeze bomb batteries” on roadside explosives used against U.S. troops in the Middle East.
He said he realized he wasn’t there to explore his freezing plan, when U.S. Secret Service personnel asked him if he owned a gun, or had ever been treated for mental illness. He said he was told to stay at least 1,000 yards away from former Vice President Al Gore after his inquiries “creeped him out.”
Beck was driving a taxi at the time, and after seeing the movie “Taxi Driver,” he believes his occupation might have helped him “fit the profile” of a possible security threat.
A spokeswoman said the Secret Service would neither confirm nor deny that the interview took place without a lengthy process including a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
Being himself
Many people whose ideas meet with skepticism take pains in news interviews to appear as conventional and non-quirky as possible. Beck, who used to live in Hermosa but now lives in Torrance, makes no effort to hide his individualism.
He appears before the Hermosa Beach City Council to trumpet causes such as “European-style beaches” where the sun can splash the entire human form with its healing vitamin D, and medical marijuana, for which he has helmed a nonprofit delivery service for South Bay patients.
Asked what he does these days to make ends meet, Beck cheerfully described his fulltime work as a figure model for art students and animators, before whom he enthusiastically poses European-style, sometimes thrusting an imaginary spear in imitation of an ancient Greek warrior.
“I love to be in front of the girls for three hours,” he said, enjoying a laugh at his own expense. “They give me all this attention, all this eye contact – then reality sets in, and they pack up and go, and I return to my wormlike existence.”
He also goes to a nude beach “every sunny Sunday,” he said. “I’m an art model; I can’t have tan lines. It’s unacceptable for a warrior to have tan lines, because they never wore clothes when they worked out.”
Returning to the Gulf tragedy, Beck believes government officials should listen eagerly to new ideas, and not be turned off by the individualistic nature of America’s potential innovators. And while he describes the icy receptions to his freezing plans with wry humor, his wish to be helpful is not a flippant one.
“Eventually the whole Gulf of Mexico is going to die,” he said. ER