Kevin Costner announced that he will assist teams working to clean up the BP oil spill that is continuing to gush oil into the Gulf Of Mexico with a device he paid to develop with professional engineers. The oil spill is still leaking alarming amounts of crude oil around the clock, adding to the hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil already in the ocean.

Kevin Costner is stepping up to the plate as the first big celebrity to take a public interest in what could be one of the largest oil spills in US History. The BP oil spill was started by a Transocean oil rig explosion on April 20th. The following day the BP contracted rig sank and began gushing thousands of gallons of oil into the ocean and still has not stopped.

Kevin Costner has invested in a device that can remove 97 percent of oil from tainted sea water and would like to implement his device in the cleanup efforts, reported treehugger.com.

Costner has been contributing to the project for over than ten years, spending $24 million of his own money to find a solution for rescue teams working against oil spills.

The Academy Award-winning actor first took an interest in oil clean up after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. The Exxon oil spill was estimated to have released more than ten million gallons of oil near Alaska, damaging wild life and nearby beaches, reported the New York Times.

“Kevin saw the Exxon Valdez spill, and as a fisherman and an environmentalist, it just stuck in his craw, the fact that we didn’t have separation technology,” said Costner’s lawyer John Houghtaling to the New York Times.

The issue clean-up teams are facing in the Gulf Of Mexico is a lack of awareness surrounding the location of the actual broken pipe. With the oil being so thick, cleanup crews cannot see the location of the leak. With extra funding and Costner’s new device, clean-up teams will have more technology to work with to find the source of the oil. No official reports have been made regarding the effectiveness of Costner’s machine on a large scale.

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