Elastec won the $1M Oil Cleanup X Challenge with a skimmer of 64 grooved plastic discs

NPR reported in October 2011 that Illinois-based Elastec/American Marine won the $1 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, run by the X Prize Foundation and funded by Wendy Schmidt. The industry standard was 1,100 gallons of oil skimmed per minute and the challenge asked for 2,500. Elastec's design removed oil at nearly twice that goal.

The machine is about the size of a large U-Haul truck and looks like a giant abacus: 64 grooved plastic discs in rows, with a scraper along the top. Oil is attracted to plastic and water is not, so oil adheres to the discs, is scraped into a trough, and is pumped away. Project manager Don Johnson says it works at nearly 90 percent efficiency. CEO Donnie Wilson says the design 'was on the drawing board' and the prize 'was certainly the incentive to get our best ideas out'.

Oil sticks to plastic while water slips off, so the discs pick up mostly oil.

Grooves add surface area, letting each rotation carry more oil.

A fixed scraper moves the oil continuously into a trough for pumping.

The prize gave a mid-sized firm a reason to prioritise an idea already on its drawing board.

A large prize can pull a company's best shelved design forward, and simple physics (oil sticks, water doesn't) can beat decades of incremental work.

X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis said the winning technology was four times better than anything available in 20 years. NPR reports Elastec, with about 150 employees mostly in Carmi, Illinois, was getting orders from around the world and would need to hire more. The skimmer suits fast removal in events such as a tanker spill, not a spill on the scale of the previous year's Gulf of Mexico disaster.