New boat pump system designed for cleaner water

The Springfield-based designer and manufacturer of pumps and purification systems has developed a new bilge pump system for ships.

Generally, a bilge pump is used to pump collected water out of the bottom of a boat and into the surrounding water. Pumps are fitted with filtering systems to remove contaminants – usually engine or fuel oil – from the water prior to pumping.

But bilge water can legally contain as much as 20 mg of oil per liter of water.

At a rate of 300 gallons per hour – an average rate for a small ship – that’s more than a pound of oil a day dumped into the ocean.

Rob Simon, president of Allen Filters Inc., says his company’s new system avoids that problem.

“Our system removes all the water and vaporizes it, leaving the oil to be recovered,” Simon said. “There’s no discharge from the ship back into the ocean – it’s a zero-discharge bilge water purification system.”

The new system, which is a variation on one the company has been making for nearly 60 years, heats ambient air and mixes it with the oily water, vaporizing the water and collecting the oil. The oil can then be either collected in a separate reservoir to be dispatched once the ship returns to shore, or can be rerun through the ship’s engines.

“We haven’t actually sold one yet,” Simon said of the boat pump systems, which the company is working to patent.

“This has been a (research and development) effort for the last two years. The problem was that even though you vaporize the water, there’s still a bit of oil mist, so we had to remove that so there was only water escaping.”

The system is not inexpensive – a model that handles 300 gallons per hour costs about $30,000, with larger systems running as much as $150,000.

But Simon said the cost has not deterred potential clients for the system, which the company began marketing near the end of 2006.

“The U.S. Navy is canvassing the market for systems that are available,” Simon said. “The Coast Guard is also interested, and tanker companies are also interested – they’ve approached us for some initial exploratory talks about large systems, because tankers take relatively large systems.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Weather Service, has responded in recent years to instances in California and Alaska where pumps were unknowingly leaking large amounts of oil and waste into surrounding waters.

Even small amounts of oil tend to collect in sediments and smaller marine organisms, NOAA says, which can be harmful to the ecosystem.

Both problems could be reduced with systems that don’t discharge into surrounding waters.

Calls to NOAA were not returned by press time.

Simon said that Allen Filters also is working on a similar oil purification system for the Egyptian government.

“There is a lot of interest in the Far East and the Middle East for the system,” Simon said, adding that the company has hired a marketing specialist, who will start in February to focus on those markets.

Simon is no stranger to foreign markets – he worked for Exxon for 30 years, mainly in Saudi Arabia and the Far East.

Since joining the company in February 2005, Simon said business has increased about a hundred-fold, due in large part to increased outsourcing of actual filter and machine construction.

That outsourcing is also part of the reason why the firm’s monthly payroll was reduced by more than 90 percent shortly after Simon’s arrival.