Ships make their way through surface oil near a barge funnelling off oil from the site of the sunken Deepwater Horizon wellhead Tuesday. Photo: Beltra/Greenpeace

NY Daily News - Could there be a happy Hollywood ending to the Gulf oil spill?

Enter "Waterworld" star Kevin Costner, who has spent years and millions of dollars perfecting a device that cleans oil from seawater.

British Petroleum - desperate for ideas - gave the okay to test six of Costner's gizmos this week, said BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles. 

Costner's high-speed centrifuge machine has a Los Angeles-perfect name: "Ocean Therapy."

Placed on a barge, it sucks in large quantities of polluted water, separates out the oil and spits back 97% clean water.

"It's like a big vacuum cleaner," said Costner's business partner, Louisiana  trial lawyer John Houghtaling. 

"The machines are basically sophisticated centrifuge devices that can handle a huge volume of water," he said.

The "Field of Dreams" star first got a team together to create the device in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

His scientist brother, Dan Costner, helped develop the device, and together, the brothers formed Costner Industries Nevada Corp. to pursue various energy projects, including a non-chemical battery that could last 15 years.

The 55-year-old actor eventually sank $26 million into the Ocean Therapy oil separator project. He obtained a license for the device from the Department of Energy in 1993 and has been trying for years to promote it.

In 2007, he told London's Daily Mail that he had blown millions on "technologies I thought would help the world" and had nothing to show for it.

"I've lost $40 million-plus," he said. "But I knew that if I was right, it would change things in an incredibly positive way."

Last week, he was in Louisiana seeking redemption, demonstrating his Ocean Therapy contraption.

"I'm just really happy that the light of day has come to this," Costner said.

Though reporters largely greeted his ideas with snickers, BP apparently wasn't laughing.

At least 210,000 gallons of oil per day is gushing into the sea from the ocean floor where the BP rig exploded April 20. The oil company has tried several novel solutions, but none has worked so far to plug the leak.

The company is skimming the oil, spraying it with dispersant chemicals underwater and trying to burn it on the surface.

Nineteen percent of the Gulf's lucrative fisheries are closed, billions of beach tourist dollars are at stake and dozens of seagoing species are threatened.

Costner has 300 of his Ocean Therapy machines in various sizes. The largest, at 21/2 tons, is able to clean water at a rate of 200 gallons a minute - faster than the well is leaking, Houghtaling noted.

Meanwhile, the 50 or so tar balls that washed up this week in the Florida Keys Coast Guard announced, temporarily calming tourism jitters.
"The source of the tar balls remains unknown at this time," the Coast Guard said. are not from the BP spill, the

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said a tendril of oil from the slick entered the Loop Current that leads to the Gulf Stream yesterday, prompting fresh fears for Florida's tourist industry.

A counterclockwise eddy in the Loop Current that might keep the oil contained - at least for now - has been observed, NOAA said.

NOAA set up a "virtual Incident Command Center" in St. Petergburg, Fla., just in case.