HARDISTY, Alberta – A new startup oilfield service, registered as Fizzy Klean, has inked several major contracts to clean up oil spills in Alberta and British Columbia. Mikilay Ghastronoff, a production engineer from Flaunt Oil Services, was trying anything he could find to clean the invert drilling mud off of his boots after a field visit to their 4-19 well near Rimbey. He had heard the rig hands talking about dumping a can of Coke into laundry to clean coveralls and decided it was worth a shot. When he dumped the soda drink on his boots, the invert just wiped off. No muss no fuss. He took the finding to a friend who also worked at Flaunt, Franco Boudarelly, and the two began researching industrial feasibility and cost structures. After convincing several financial backers that the product would work as described, they both left Flaunt and started Fizzy Klean Inc.
Mikilay Ghastonoff, loves Coke
We had a product that was already patented, but we needed to somehow corner the market with our application technology, and of course the deals with Coca Cola. We managed to get exclusivity from Coke for 25 years, and our technology of submersion soil injection has a 10 year shelf life. Fizzy Klean is the way of the future. We are also working on aquatic applications for offshore spills. – Mikilay Ghastonoff, P Eng.
Chemical engineers from Serious About Chemicals were hired to try and identify what the key ingredient is in Coke that makes it such a great petroleum dispersion agent. After several months, they could not identify any specific compound in the popular drink, citing several important reasons why the research should be terminated.
Drip Tyler, Chemical Engineer
We were sure there the key was one of four compounds we isolated in the drink mix, but beyond that we were stumped. Coke uses such a variety of household chemicals in the product that it would take years to break out and isolate individual reactions between ingredients. There is a strong possibility that the reaction between Mr Clean and caramel syrup is where we could have focused, but a cease and desist letter from legal counsel at Coca Cola put our study out of commission. – Drip Tyler, Chem Eng, SAC
Technology is where Fizzy Klean will literally clean up. A hybrid between a hypodermic needle and a John Deere farm sprayer was devised to make sure the Coke product thoroughly saturated petroleum soaked soil. As the sprayer drives, it literally injects the ground with Coke to clean up any contamination in a jiffy. Tests have been run in several oilfields with a near 100% success rate according to Franco Boudarelly.
Franco Boudarelly, selling the dream at the University of Alberta
We have successfully cleaned up 13 oil regions with bad spills so far. Our technology works wonders and it is going to make people think differently about oil spills. We can clean them up now. Easily. So go ahead and spill it, no problem. Timing for effective treatment is our only issue, as driving these trucks of Coke down most rural roads fizzes up the tanks. We have to wait 12 hours after travel to disperse the Coke, and Saskatchewan is a no go given the state of the highways in that province. We had a tank explode a few months ago near Estevan.
