>> today, on "earth focus," ocean challenges and solutions. as oil spills and acidification threaten marine life, the xprize ocean initiative stimulates innovation to protect one of our planet's most valuable resources. coming up on "earth focus." >> the flash of power. the gleam of oil. in the sky, the power of oil conquering the heights. on the sea, the might of petroleum, pulsing in great engines of the liners that traverse the deep. on land, oil feeds the fiery

furnace or drives the diesel engines along far-flung rails of steel. and on the open road, well, you know what makes your auto run. for millions of years, this source of pow slept peacefully in the dark recesses of the earth until modern magic loosed the liquid energy from its subterranean prison. >> the quest for oil was not only confined to land. it extended offshore. there are oil reserves under the coastal waters of the united states, mainly off the coasts of california, alaska, texas, and louisiana. the gulf of mexico, home to a rich diversity of marine life, and it also produces almost a quarter of america's oil. tapping these offshore oil reserves helps meet a significant part of u.s. energy needs.

but when things go wrong, there's a high price to pay. in 1969, the santa barbara oil spill dumped two and a half million gallons of oil into the pacific, killing thousands of sea birds and marine mammals. in 1989, the exxon valdez oil tanker ran aground in alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of oil into prince william sound. and most recently, in 2010, the bp deepwater horizon disaster, which according to u.s. government estimates, released 210 million gallons of oil into the gulf of mexico. >> 57 days ago, in the dead of night, the worst environmental nightmare in u.s. history began. on a screen here and in homes across the country, we now see

the le video of tens of thousands of barrels of oil billowing into the gulf of mexico every day. for years, the oil industry swore this could never happen. we were told the technology had advanced, that offshore drilling was safe. bp said they didn't think the rig would sink. it did. they said they could handle an exxon valdez size spill every day. they couldn't. bp said the spill was 1,000 barrels per day. it wasn't, and they knew it. in preparation for this hearing, the committee reviewed the oil spill safety response plans for all of the companies here today. what we found was that these 5 companies have response plans that are virtually identical. the plans site identical response capabilities and tout

identical ineffective equipment. >> over one million dollars will be awarded to the teams that prove that their cleanup system could meet the competition's strictest requirements. >> our first prize, the winn schmidt oil cleanup x challenge was a response, essentially, to something we all remember, the deepwater horizon oil spill in the gulf of mexico. in 2010-- i certainly remember, i'm sure a lot of folks do--this was ongoing every day, oil spilling into the gulf, the havoc it was wreaking on wetlands and other critical ecosystems of the gulf coast, you know, from texas all the way to florida. and the sort or feeling of helplessness. >> the spill was the size of hawaii. it was literally an oil tsunami

in the gulf of mexico. thousands and thousands of gallons of crude oil spilling into the water every minute, every day. this was a manmade catastrophe. and it just struck me that this is--this is the scariest thing i've ever seen. this is a serious threat when oil spills, not just to marine life. obviously that's bad, and obviously the beaches. we're still getting tar washing up on those beaches now. but alsoo the livelihoods e people in these regions. in the gulf, 8 out of 10 people have a livelihood connected either to the oil and gas drilling industry or to hospitality and tourism. and all of those things were devastated by this spill. >> thepill has brought life, uh, to a lot of the issues in thgulf and all of the ancillary businesses. family fisheries, docks,

the marina, the ehouses, the transportation companies, people who provide snacks and groceries to stores. all of that is a direct reflection of what can happen when things cease. >> after the oil spill, you know, they shut recreational fishing, they shut commercial fishing, and that just killed everybody in this part of the world, really. it's affected everythi, and it's affected every business around. >> it's how we count off the seasons. it's oyster season or it's crab season, it's, you know, crawfish season, you know, and even that we're having some issues with. we've taken it for grantedor so long thait's-- it's a little disconcerting and it feels different how you approach things that's affecting my life and my culture.

>> two years ago, the people of bp made a commitment to the gulf, and every day since, we've worked hard to keep it. >> bp has paid over $23 billion to help people and businesses who were affected and to cover cleanup costs. >> today, the beaches and gulf are open for everyone to enjoy, and many areas are reporting the best tourism seasons in years. >> now is the perfect time to visit any one of our states. >> the beaches and waters couldn't be more beautiful. >> take a boat ride, go fishing, or just lay in the sun. >> we've got coastline to explore and wildlife to photograph. >> and there's more of class dining with our world famous seafood. >> so for a great vacation this year, come to the gulf. >> this invitation is brought to you by bp and all of us who call the gulf home. >> unfortunately, things for a commercial fisherman in southeast louisiana is not as good as those bp commercials would have you believe. my shrimp production is down, still down, between 40 and 60% in my area. i've been making a living on lake boeuf myself for 29

yearsn the boat. i can't do it anymore. my oyster production is down at least 93%. in the last 4 years, i might have sold about 1,500 sacks. in 4 years. i used to sell that a week. but $240 millions worth of bp commercials has a lot of people believing that we'rek. we're not. people are losing it because they can't do what they want to do for a living. so you get a choice of let's go do something else. they give you an option. we'll retrain you. i say, what you gonna retrain me to be, a brain surgeon? or a cable installer. either one of them sucks. i don't have the education to be a brain surgeon and i'm not going to go install cable. if you take me and put me in the carpenter field or the welding, well, i'm putting somebody else out of a job. so here comes that domino effect we were telling you about. oyster production is like the canary in a mine. ok. the canary dies, you in trouble. get out of there. until we get our oyster population back, which filters the waters, we're not going to have a good environment. you know, commercial fisherman, you have

highs and lows economics. highs and lows with weather, hurricanes, you know. but this manmade disaster is just lingering. >> the technology that was being used to clean up the deepwater horizon spill, the oil in the gulf of mexico, was the same technology as had been used in the "exxon valdez" spill in alaska. in fact, there were some of the same machines, the same tools, stuck in storage, brought out a couple of decades later. as if nothing had changed. >> the industry hadn't moved from where it was in 20-something years. >> the idea of an xprize challenge to find a better way to clean it up seemed like the most obvious and practical thing to do. >> so xprize came up and set an audaciousut achievable goal. 2,500 gallons per minute of oil cleaned up at 80% rate of oil clean up. and you have to do it in 14 months. that 2,500

gallons per minute was about double the industry standard. this is technologically achievable. it is. people just haven't been incented to do it. >> we have one shot to get this right. once we launch the prize, we can't change the rules. the teams are spending their own money. and so we want to make sure we get it right. and so, we spend a lot of time talking to all the potential stakeholders, including those that would hopefully adopt these technologies and buy these technologies from the ams that are competing at the end of the day. the top 10 teams got to test at the only place in the world you could test oil spill technologies at scale. >> you know can imagine, you can't just go spill oil in the ocean and test things out and see if they work. so there is actually a facility in new jersey run by the u.s. government, on a naval base where you've got a massive tank several football fields long that allows you to spill oil and simulate oil clean up. >> rentg that was quite expensive for us. and it was on a naval base, so it was very hard to get clearances. so these

teams would not have been able to afford to rent this facility, nor would ty have been able to get access use this facility. >> and it also allowed us to create these, more or less, real world conditions, whereby we could test and see if these devices would work in the real world. >> all aboard! >> keep the faith, baby. keep the faith. >> 10 finalists came together at the end of that 14 months. 10 finalists came up with something. >> [cheering] nice job! >> just like we planned. >> i've never seen a machine pick up so much oil, ever. it's remarkable. >> and it turns out that the winning design at the end of the competition had actually been on somebody's drafting table several years earlier. it was just sitting there when

there was no demand for the new product, no need to clean things up better than we were already doing. >> with an overall oil recovery rate of 4,670 gallons per minute, more than 3 times the industry's previous best tested recovery rate, our $1 million first place winner, team elastec american marine. [cheers and applause] >> in 2011, we awarded our wendy schmidt oil clean up xchallenge. the winners, elastec american marine with a million dollar check. and this, of course, is the prize that they won for more than doubling the industry best standard for oil clean up that had existed to that point. >> prizes have actually been around for over 300 years. back in 1714 was the longitude prize. it was a $20,000 prize put on by the british government to help us figure out where we were from a longitudal basis when we were

crossing the oceans. and everybody assumed when they put this prize out there that it would either be a ship's captain or it would be an astronomer that won this prize. and it was actually a clock maker. and he was this outside innovator that nobody ever would have expected to win a prize like this. napoleon used prizes. we have canned food because napoleon's army needed to be fed and so they figured out a way to preserve food, right. lindbergh flew across the atlantic for a prize. there was a $25,000 prize for the first person that could fly non-stop from paris to new york or new york to paris. and it went on and on and on. in fact, prizes were one of the main tools that governments had to get innovation because either, you know, our modern research institutions weren't set up or, you know, the money just wasn't being set. and then came around world war i, world war ii, when the government really started funding innovation and just started throwing a ton of money at things, that prizes sort of dissipated. >> when we started the xprize back in 1996, everybody knew

that only governments--in fact, only two governments could put human beings into space. and the purpose of the xprize was to change what everybody knew about that by requiring a demonstration of private space flight twice in two weeks with the same ship. and that kicked off the whole suborbital space flight industry. >> and launch of the spacex falcon 9 rocket, anasa turns to the private sector to re-supply the international space station. >> we can do this for other things. we can do this for energy and environment. we can do this for oceans. we can do this for exploration. we can do this for health. and that's what really launched the version of xprize that we see today. right, that is not just about space. >> the oceans are under attack. if we wanted to destroy the oceans, if we set out to do

that, i don't think could do a better job than we're doing now. is that the kind of planet we want to live on? you know, you've got pollution. you've got co2 absorbing into the ocean. you've got 80% of the plastics-- 450 billion tons of plastic manufactured every year, and 80% of it's not recycled. and it ends up in the ocean and it ends up in these giant gyres of plastic which are in every ocean now, not just the pacific gyre that people talk about. we're overfishing. 90% of the big fish are gone. and at the same time, you can say we've plored about 5% of the oceans. we have better maps of the surface of mars than we have of under our own oceans on our own planet. there's something wrong there. right? our fundamental understanding of our relationship to the ocean has to change in, i would say, the ne few deces, or we really-e are really putting our own survival at risk. >> there's life on this planet

because of the oceans. life started in the oceans. it continues to govern things, everything from the climate to lobal food supply, right. and yet this sort of watery deep, as it were, is still basically unknown to us people. >> not only do almost 3 billion people make their living with work associated with the oceans, but it's a major source of protein in the human diet. 70% of the oxygen we breathe comes from the oceans. we need the oceans, the oceans don't need us. that's the fundamental disconnect. the biggest silent threat to the oceans from humans is ocean acidification. 's happening. it's happening 10 to 100 times faster than at any time in the last 50 million years. in fact, since the 1900s, early 1900s,

the ocean is 30% more acidic. >> ph, or really the acidity of the ocean, is changing as a result of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. this is ultimately sort of the evil twin of climate change. >> we look at global warming. we talk about the changes in our atmosphere. we need to look at the changes in our ocean. >> we'e been pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially since the industrial revolution, with the burning of fossil fuels. and that carbon dioxide has to go somewhere, and some of that is going into the oceans. they estimate about 30% has gone into the oceans. and the problem in the oceans is it has to react to that carbon dioxide. and that's how we get the phenomenon of ocean acidification. >> over 70% of all of the oxygen in our air, the oxygen we breathe, is produced by phytoplankton in the ocean. that means when you're putting that at risk by changes in ph, you're putting at risk the very

air we breathe, quite frankly. this is why it's a threat of geologic global proportions. >> if you like jellyfish more than shellfish, then it's not a problem, 'cause they're gonna love an adic ocean. you'll have plenty of jellyfish. but if you like mussels and clams and oysters and things that you like to eat, they're in big trouble because they can no longer make their shells. we're seeing the effects of this already. >> so we're cousins. our dads are bill taylor and paul taylor, and they run taylor shellfish. >> and i'm brittany taylor, and this is diani taylor.

>> that, too. >> and we're the fifth generation of our family to work for our family business. i really take pride in the fact that our company's part of a big community and it's very family-like. we have many families, not only mine, but many other families that have their whole families that work for us. >> the ocean is so acidic that it is dissolving the shell of our baby oysters. our farm is what has kept this family together. it's our glue. i can't imagine. it would be devastating to lose such a big part of our history. when we started farming oysters over 100 years ago, we relied on the natural reproduction of oysters in the bay to occur in

order to get our oysters. but as the industry has changed, we started cultivating our own oyster larvae, our own baby oysters. so when we started doing that, we needed something like our hatchery, which is kind of like a greenhouse where you can raise up the baby shellfish and the baby oysters to get big enough so that we can go and plant them on our beaches. >> it took us a while to figure out what was happening in our hatcheries relating to ocean acidification, just because there's so many different things that can happen to make seed not survive. one of the things the hatcheries realized was that the clams and oysters were having problems forming their shells, so that

made them look at the ph levels 'cause that can account for it. shellfish is very vulnerable when it's first being created. and it's the acidity in the water that makes it hard for them to form their shells. >> so when it reaches the baby oysters in the first few days of life, that acidic water actually will dissolve the shell, which is calcium. and if they don't make it through the first few weeks of its life when it's being affected by ocean acidification, then we have no oysters to plant on our beach. so it's something that we truly experience and deal with on a day-to-day basis. it's not something that's gonna happen potentially in 5 or 10 years. along the coast of oregon, there's a specific function called upwelling where deeper water is coming up towards the surface. and it's that deeper water that is the acidic water. we don't know how bad ocean acidification is going to

get. we're just starting to experience the consequences of it. what we're experiencing here in the puget sound is what other people will be experiencing not too long in the future. >> i definitely want to be able to pass on our business onto the next generation. >> yeah, it would be fun to share that experience with the next generation, like our dads shared with us. >> and this really brings us to the next xprize challenge, right, that we're launching right now. we're looking for teams to come together to develop accurate, portable, deployable sensors to tell us what the ocean ph is in various places. right now if you want to discover how acidic the ocean is, we can do that with devices that exist. in shallow, temperate waters, we can get a pretty accurate measurement.

but it costs almost $40,000 a day to go and get that information. and there's no need for that anymore. surely we can deploy technologies that can be used universally in many applications, and also in this way, help to launch an ocean services industry where lots of information can be shared along all the kinds of people who need to understand this, whether you're running a fishery, whether you're running a boat service, whether you're doing research somewhere. what are we dealing with? is the ocean more acidic when it's colder? when it's deeper? when it's closer to shore? we don't know any of this information. so we're hoping through this competition that a lot of doors will open and we really will improve the state of awareness about the health of our oceans. in fact, we're calling it ocean health xprize 'cause a healthy ocean is not a rapidly acidifying ocean. and if it is, what are we gonna do

to mitigate that? >> you can't really do anything to adapt to ocean acidification or mitigate it until you understand how severe how it is, where is it severe, how are the organisms adapting or not adapting to it? so it's really hard to say, this is exactly what we're going to be able to do until we have these sensors in place. >> this prize isall about measurement. it's all about the fact that we just haven't-- we haven't explored the physical parts of the ocean, we really haven't explored the chemistry of the ocean. and this prize is challenging a brand new generation of explorers to do just that--create those tools that will give everybody the solutions, ultimately, to addressing what is a global threat to ocean health. >> we are in a single, wonderful ecosystem on this planet. and the system has evolved over millions of years without us, by the way. what is our relationship, actually, in

the system we live in? 'cause w're part of it. and i think we can do very, very well if we think about our relationship to natural resources in that way, including the oceans. we really are gonna have a very different planet in a hundred years. we would be the first--first generation in the history of humanity to knowingly make choices that do not benefit our descendants, to knowingly refuse to address the things that they will look back and say, what were you thinking? people in my position who have the capacity to help make a difference have an urgent responsibility to do that. we don't have an urgent responsibility to build our foundations up so that they can function 100 years from now. that's not the purpose. the purpose is to go out and be effective now. this iwhen it counts. ■x■xqóñóñóñóñóñóñ fñl k

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