The following article is the second in a series of four that is being published this week. The subject is Jim Cobb and his patented oil spill techniques and equipment and the government's and oil industry's response to it.

After the refusal of industry to seriously consider his ideas following the Exxon Valdez spill, and the short-comings that he saw in the SERVS equipment, Jim Cobb decided to scrap his improvements to their design and begin anew on a different plan for oil spill mitigation.

“It became an obsession. I’ve tweaked nets from gear that was the norm in the salmon and herring fishing industry constantly through the years. Even as I purse seined through the seasons and worked with the gear, I would think to myself, ok, what if this was an oil spill, what would work the best,” said Jim. “I knew, just like fishing, in an oil spill, the weather would not cooperate and cleanup would have to contend with wind, tide and currents, soon I was drawing for hours every week.”

“Sometimes it was frustrating as I worked through the maze trying to understand the physics of oil, water, and reactions to different conditions. When I made observations of oil-water separation or some other detail, I logged it for my own reference. Eventually, I had accumulated what I call my ‘tool chest,’ observations and ideas on how to overcome obstacles such as night, heavy seas, tide, current, reduced visibility, etc.”

Finally, Jim was confident in his work, he amassed all of his drawings, illustrations ideas and observations and decided it was time to let some of the companies see what he had put together. He contacted numerous companies. But, he received no response.

Cobb eventually contacted Chevron just as they were rolling out their television ads that pointed out how much the environment meant to their company. “I bugged them until I eventually got to speak with Al Cocomo of Richmond, California. I had been told that he was the man to talk to. But, unfortunately, in a very short conversation, he told me flatly, Chevron was not interested.”

“I felt that I had to face reality, no one was interested in my work, I would get nowhere.” Jim reflected.

“Then on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News on April 13^th, 2008, I saw a photo of Alaska Clean Seas and other oil industry funded groups. They had failed with their oil spill response equipment that included response in an oil-ice-mixture scenario. Realizing that after such a huge investment, and an inadequate plan in place holding them back from oil exploration off-shore in the arctic, that this was a serious challenge that the industry had to overcome,” said Jim.

Knowing that he had a system design in place for oil retrieval in the open ocean as well as river and marsh systems, and for spill situations where the sheen extended for miles, Cobb took his “tool bag” one step further and began work on a retrieval system for spill conditions with an ice-mixture. By fall, Jim had that system mapped out as well.

“With all the time I and effort that I had invested in this project that covered approximately 18 years, and seeing that it was relatively complete, I decided that it was time to patent the work that I had done.” Jim continued, “I set up a meeting with a law firm in Anchorage, and by December of that year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark office had reviewed and examined my material and I received a patent pending. I now had the approval of the first step in the application process and material. I began sending out Non-Disclosure agreements to industry and spill response organizations. “

Jim would eventually recieve issued patents for the United States and Canada, his patent is still currently pending in Norway.

Cobb sent his first Non-Disclosure to Peter Slaiby of Shell Alaska, then Alaska Clean Seas, a consortium of 11 big oil companies that included giants such as Exxon, BP, Conoco Phillips, etc. The documents were also sent to Alaska Chadux Corp, as well as all the other spill response companies in the state of Alaska.

Material was sent to the North Slope Borough to inform the communities in the Arctic of the new technology as well. “I contacted so many organizations, it is now all a blur.” Jim reflected.

Still, dead silence from industry and government.

“Having done all that I could, I concentrated on my patent process. In order to add validity to my work, I completed the PCT application process that is a collection of data from a 22 nation treaty of patent information,” Jim said. “It was time consuming and very expensive, but I felt if it helped bring attention to the fact that there was nothing else out there like it, it was worth it.” Jim was pleased to find that there was in fact nothing in the databases of the 22 nations similar to his patent.

James Cobb is a life-long Alaskan and Bering Sea Yupik Eskimo who has fished in the Alaska fishing industry his entire life. He is also the owner of Retriever Environmental, a company dedicated to oil spill mitigation. He can be reached by phone at (907) 299-4767 or by email at retriever.environmental@gmail.com. The Alaska Native News gives full permission to re-post or re-print this article.

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