Nigel Bennett is watching closely as efforts are underway to extract fuel from a cruise ship run aground off the west coast of Italy.

The co-founder and owner of Aqua-Guard Spill Response, which specializes in oil cleanup, is hoping for the best but knows crews are prepared for the worst.

“They are fairly well prepared, which is a good thing,” he said of the Italian crews on standby for a possible oil spill as oil is pumped from the ship’s 17 large tanks that hold about 2,200 cubic metres of fuel.

Just weeks before the Costa Concordia crashed near Tuscany Jan. 13, teams from the North Vancouver company were in Italy to lead training courses for spill-response contractors in the region. It was part of an effort started two years ago when Aqua-Guard was called to Italy to work with an Italian oil-spill response consortium as they re-evaluated spill-response contractors around the country.

The North Vancouver company then won about 80 per cent of the tenders put out to upgrade the oil-spill response — mostly the skimming systems — for all of those contractors.

Just before the January collision, Aqua-Guard was contacted again to lead training sessions in Italy for the group to get them up to international standards. Workers were still there the day the Costa Concordia reportedly veered too close to a small island and hit land, tearing a large hole in its hull. The ship listed severely as a result, and passengers scrambled to evacuate. Of the 4,200 passengers on board, 17 are confirmed dead and 15 are still missing.

In order to avoid a possible oil spill, a Dutch salvage firm has been contracted to pump out the fuel from the ship’s tanks before the ship can be moved.

On standby at the site are a number of Aqua-Guard’s oil-skimming machines.

The equipment is being used by one of the company’s Italian customers, and is there in case the pump or the hose rupture during the fuel transfer, causing an oil spill.

“If they had a rupture and a good portion of that spilled, it could be a couple of months to clean up. It all depends on the weather conditions and other things, including if (the fuel) coats the island,” explained Bennett.

Although Aqua-Guard primarily focuses on recovering oil from water surfaces, it also has vacuum systems designed and built in North Vancouver that can be used on a shoreline.

“I never like it when it gets to the shoreline. It’s a much more difficult task of cleaning it up,” said Bennett.

The oil-skimming equipment being used at the site is technology developed in North Vancouver by the company, and patented about four years ago.

“It has really taken off globally and become kind of a standard in the oil-skimming technology,” said Bennett.

In 2010, the company supplied more than 100 smaller systems to the oil-spill response in the Gulf of Mexico after oil gushed into the gulf following an explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig.

Teams from the North Vancouver company also travelled to the gulf area to train fish boat captains and barge operators to use equipment to help skim up the oil.

Bennett said it was a very busy four months for the group.

“At the same time, our bigger stuff was really evolving, so after the BP oil spill our bigger stuff really took off,” he added.

The BP spill involved fresh crude oil right out of the ground, and the cruise ship in Italy carries a heavy bunker fuel, explained Bennett. He noted if a spill occurred from the ship, the cleanup would essentially be the same as that in the gulf, using the company’s brush-skimming technology.

The past year has been really busy for Aqua-Guard, with its large oil-skimming machines being sent all over the world, including Japan, Korea, Venezuela and Brazil.

In some of those areas where information and the media is controlled by the government, news of oil spills is not always released to the rest of the world.

“We spend a lot of our time down in markets (where) nobody will ever hear about these oil spills,” said Bennett.

He said the fact that his company is so busy could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing.

“I think it’s a bit of both. I think there are more and more oil spills now, especially on the exploration side of it because it’s harder to get. We have to go further and further off shore, drilling deeper and deeper in order to be able to get the oil, but there’s also a lot more risk involved too,” he explained, adding many companies reacted to the BP oil spill by realizing they had to improve their own standards.

“Because of the BP oil spill down in the Gulf of Mexico last year, the awareness globally is really heightened,” said Bennett. “They’re becoming more proactive. We can always be a little bit better, but they’re definitely ramping up.”

He said he looks forward to a day when his company’s services are no longer needed.

“Unfortunately and fortunately we’ve been involved in a lot of oil-spill response cleanup with equipment and people. (The technology) is getting better. The thing is, you have to stop having spills. It doesn’t matter how good the stuff is cleaning it up, you spilled it.

“When the day comes that we’re out of business, that’s probably a good thing, when we’re not having oil spills anymore.”

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