EVTN Voraxial, Florida Finalist in $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge
FORT LAUDERDALE - South Florida cleantech firm, Enviro Voraxial Technology, announced today that their company team, Team Voraxial, will move forward to the final phase of the $1.4 Million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE.
The X PRIZE Foundation, the leading nonprofit organization solving the world's Grand Challenges of our time by creating and managing large-scale, global incentivized competitions, designed by the challenge to inspire entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface. The X CHALLENGE was launched in July 2010 in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The compactness, light weight and low energy requirements of the Voraxial enables it to be installed on new vessels or retrofitted on existing vessels for oil spill response. Additionally, similar to other auxiliary equipment on vessels such as firefighting hoses, the Voraxial's small footprint allows it to be secured on vessels, such as tug boats and supply vessels, without interfering with the main function of the vessel.
Multiple Voraxial 8000 models, each capable of processing 7,000,000 gallons of oily water per day, can easily be retrofitted on an average size supply vessel or tug boat and quickly convert them into a high volume oil spill recovery vessel. To put this in perspective, an average supply vessel equipped with 3 Voraxial 8000 Separators can capture, process and separate over 20 million gallons of oily water per day.
Last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was estimated to be 2.1 million gallons per day (50,000 barrels). The spills damage to the environment could have been significantly mitigated if vessels equipped with Voraxial Separators were deployed immediately.
"We are proud to be advancing to the finals in this competition," stated Laura Di Bella, Vice President of Marketing and Investor Relations for EVTN. "We believe that the Voraxial is an integral tool for oil spill recovery and are excited that the judges at X PRIZE Foundation have validated our technology. We are obviously in it to win, but at the end of the day, the real winner will be the environment."
