If you made the mess, you should learn to clean it up, says Wendy Schmidt.
Schmidt is the president of the Schmidt Family Foundation which has funded the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge to award $1 million to the group that can clean oil up from water at both the highest Oil Recovery Rate (ORR) and the highest Oil Recovery Efficiency (ORE).
Schmidt was inspired to fund the challenge when she saw millions of gallons of water spill into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deep Water Horizon blowout. The long-awaited results of the challenge will be announced on Tuesday.
This video features one of the eight groups that has entered the challenge with its homemade ‘OilShaver.’ The OilShaver team is led by Dr. Ingvar Huse, a fisheries technologist with a long career in marine scientific research.
Watch this video to meet the Norwegian team as it tries to figure out how to gather 2,500 gallons of oil from the water’s surface in just one minute.
This video was originally posted by the XPrize Foundation here.