New innovative technologies for marine oil spill cleanups including Mauritius spill

Wall St Journal, By Eric Sylvers and Sarah McFarlane

AUG 31, 2020 – Re­cent oil spills in Russia and Mau­ri­tius have shown that the in­dus­try still needs bet­ter methods for clean­ing up ac­ci­dents. Re­searchers are work­ing on some un­likely-sound­ing so­lutions, in­clud­ing oil-ab­sorb­ing wood chips, a so­lar-pow­ered ro­bot and a re­usable sponge.

The oil in­dus­try is con­trolled by large com­pa­nies and their sup­pli­ers, which together have of­ten been the cause of spills, but uni­ver­sity re­searchers and small firms are playing a key role in pro­mot­ing new ways to clean up.

Re­searchers at Northwest­ern Uni­ver­sity have de­vel­oped a re­usable sponge coated in a mixture con­tain­ing iron and car­bon that can ab­sorb 30 times its weight in oil. The sponge, sim­i­lar to sponges in every­day items such as fur­ni­ture cush­ions and pack­ag­ing, has at­tracted in­ter­est for fur­ther test­ing from Several major oil companies, according to the researchers.

The num­ber of spills has de­clined in re­cent years. There were only three from tankers ex­ceed­ing seven met­ric tons last year, the low­est since the In­ternational Tanker Own­ers Pol­lu­tion Fed­er­a­tion Ltd be­gan col­lect­ing data in 1970. But 1,000 met­ric tons of oil still made its way into the en­vi­ron­ment from tankers in 2019.

Reg­u­la­tions in many coun­tries have helped re­duce spills. The 1990 Oil Pol­lu­tion Act proved a turn­ing point in the U.S., in­tro­duc­ing changes in­clud­ing in-creased penal­ties and re­quire­ments for ves­sel con­struc­tion, says Dana Tulis, the di­rec­tor of emer­gency man­age­ment for the U.S. Coast Guard. The act came the year af­ter Exxon Corp.’s Valdez tanker hit a reef off the coast of Alaska, caus­ing the sec­ond-largest spill in U.S. wa­ters, trail­ing only BP PLC’s Deep­wa­ter Horizon well blowout in 2010 in the Gulf of Mex­ico.

Re­search on find­ing bet­ter ways to clean up oil spills ac­cel­er­ated af­ter the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon dis­as­ter. But the spotty re­sponse to the spills in Rus­sia’s Arc­tic re­gion, where fuel from a power sta­tion con­t­a­m­inated a swath of land and sev­eral bod­ies of wa­ter in June, and in Mau­ri­tius, where last month a ship ran aground against a coral reef, showed cleanup meth­ods in many cases have ad­vanced lit­tle.

Some progress has been made through the use of satel­lite im­ages and re­mote sen­sors on drones, but tra­di­tional meth­ods that have lim­i­ta­tions, and that of­ten cause their own Environmental damage, still dominate.

Booms can cor­ral oil, but don’t work in rough seas or af­ter the oil has dis­persed widely. Skim-ming the oil off the sur­face of the sea usu­ally only works af­ter booms have been suc­cess­fully de­ployed. Burn­ing the oil or break­ing it down with chem­i­cals can dam­age ma­rine life, and the smoke from burn­ing causes air pol­lu­tion. Plas­tics that ab­sorb the oil must be dis­posed and con­tribute to land­fills.

“We have not invented the magic wand yet, we still have to deal with the en­vi­ron­ment and physics of oil dis­persion,” said John Tarp­ley, re­gional op­er­a­tions branch chief in the Emer­gency Re­sponse Di­vi­sion of the Na­tional Oceanic and At­mospheric Ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Re­searchers at Dresden Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­sity and Leipzig Uni­ver­sity in Ger­many have de­vel­oped a cleanup pro­to­col us­ing oil-ab­sorb­ing wood chips that are dumped into the sea by plane, he­li­copter or ship fol­low­ing an oil spill. The wood chips can be re­cov­ered—which sets them apart from most ex­ist­ing sol­vents—and if that is im­pos­si­ble be­cause of bad weather, they biode­grade in the wa­ter.

The wood chips can work in shal­low wa­ter or in bad weather, sit­u­ations when many standard meth­ods are in­ef­fective. They could have been used in the Mau­ritius spill, which was close to land and where cleanup ef­forts were ham­pered by poor weather con­di­tions, but they need to be in place be­fore­hand, and lo­cals need to be trained on how to de­ploy them, said Hol­ger Un­be­haun, a sci­en­tist at Dres­den Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­sity who de­vel­oped the wood chips.

The wood chips are in place and ready to be used if there is a spill in the Baltic Sea off Germany’s north­ern coast. They have worked in lab­o­ra­tory and field tests, but haven’t been used in an emer­gency yet. The coro­n­avirus pan­demic has stymied ef­forts to de­ploy the wood chips to other ar­eas.

“There have been no spills in the past few years in the Baltic Sea, which we are happy about, but it also means we haven’t been able to test in a real oil spill,” said Mr. Un­be­haun.

Te­jas Kabra, a 24-year-old grad­u­ate student at North Car­olina State Uni­ver­sity, de­veloped a float­ing so­lar-pow­ered ro­bot filled with nanopar­ti­cles made from tree leaves that sep­a­rate oil from wa­ter. Once the ro­bot is filled up with oil, which can be reused, it re­turns to its base. Mr. Kabra de­vel-oped the ro­bot while he was an un­der­grad­u­ate in India. It can be de­ployed where there has been a spill, or it can roam freely look­ing for oil to suck up.

“My first goal is to fin­ish my mas­ter’s degree and then I want to bring the ro­bot to market,” said Mr. Kabra.

Fol­low­ing the blowout of the Deep­water Hori­zon well, which gushed oil for three months be­fore it could be capped, eight of the world’s largest oil com­panies, in­clud­ing BP, Exxon Mo­bil and Chevron Corp., com­mis­sioned Ital­ian oil ser­vices company Saipem SpA to come up with a plug­ging mech­a­nism that can be sent rapidly around the world.

The re­sult is a 46-foot-high struc­ture with four si­los sup­port­ing a plug­ging mech­a­nism. It can be dis­as­sem­bled into about 100 pieces and trans­ported by ship or sev­eral cargo jets to where it is needed.

“Af­ter the Gulf of Mex­ico blowout, the in­dus­try saw how dif­ficult it can be to cap a run­away well, and it be­came clear that we had to come up with a bet­ter way of deal­ing with this the next time it hap­pens,” said Diego Laz­zarin, an en­gi­neered prod­ucts man­ager at a Saipem unit that worked to de­velop the plug.