New Sponge Can Soak Up and Release Spilled Oil Hundreds of Times (newscientist.com) 53
Seth Darling and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have created a new material that can absorb up to 90 times its own weight in spilled oil and then be squeezed out like a sponge and reused. This is compared to most commercial products used for soaking up oil, called "sorbents," which act like a paper towel and are only good for a single use. Once the sorbents are used, they get incinerated along with the oil. New Scientist reports: The oil sponge consists of a simple foam made of polyurethane or polyimide plastics and coated with "oil-loving" silane molecules with a sweet spot for capturing oil. Too little chemical attraction would render the sponge useless as an absorber, whereas too much would mean the oil could not be released. In laboratory tests, the researchers found that when engineered with just the right amount of silane, their foam could repeatedly soak up and release oil with no significant changes in capacity. But to determine whether this material could help sort out a big spill in marine waters, they needed to perform a special large-scale test. To do this, the team made an array of square pads of the sponge material measuring around 6 square meters. "We made a lot of the foam, and then these pieces of foam were placed inside mesh bags -- basically laundry bags, with sewn channels to house the foam," Darling says. The researchers suspended their sponge-filled bags from a bridge over a large pool specially designed for practicing emergency responses to oil spills. They then dragged the sponges behind a pipe spewing crude oil to test the material's capability to remove oil from the water. They next sent the sponges through a wringer to remove the oil and then repeated the process, carrying out many tests over multiple days. This so-far unpublished test was conducted in early December at the National Oil Spill Response Research and Renewable Energy Test Facility in Leonardo, New Jersey. Here's a video showing the sponge in action.
What about hair? (Score:5, Informative)
Years ago I read about someone who stuffed hair (collected from barbers/stylists) into a mesh-like tube that soaked up oil as it floated along the surface of the water... cheap and reusable.
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Careful there. This is the internet. You can rest assured there is some weirdo who gets off on even the strangest shit you could think of.
On a totally unrelated note, umm, I'm building such a mesh, maybe you should send your pubes to me!
Why bother (Score:1, Funny)
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Are you saying Humans are not part of the environment? Did we come from space or another dimension? Any human action is natural. Polluting the air with NOX is just as natural as a Lion killing a deer. Whether its desirable is another thing but I find it irritating when people try to say save nature and fuck the humans - Humans are nature.
Just in time (Score:1, Funny)
for the TRUMP energy policies.
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We know that in a short while (20-40 years) non-carbon burning sources of energy will be dominant players. All one needs to do is to look at a graph and witness the exponential growth since the 1970s.
We need to go from the here-and-now to the near future. Fracking and drilling makes sense here and now. Building a pipeline to bring the oil to the
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Pathetic.
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Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
A product where we can reuse the precious oil instead of having to consider it lost.
Yes, I'm dead serious. This is maybe what would make oil companies interested in cleaning up their mess. What's in it for them if they can't use the oil anymore after cleaning up the spill? But if they can still use the oil, their motivation to clean up rises.
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Even if it's not cheaper than that, it still serves to reduce the net cost of the cleanup of spills, adding to the incentive to pay for the cleanup. It may also provide incentive to get on the cleanup sooner, as the sooner they get on it the more recoverable oil there is.
Exactly,
Completely made up number for the example.
Let's say 1 barril of oil worth 100$
Pumping 1 barril of oil cost 50$
Cleaning up 1 barril of oil cost 90$
Even if pumping is 5 time more profitable than cleaning, it's still profitable and you got all the infrastructure already to get the 100$ from the baril you clean up.
It's making money and reduce the cost of penality. Win-Win
But if this sponge is still not profitable, then, clearly on a business point of view, it's a simple equation :
IF (Cost to clean - Pro
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Not so. They're going to have to pay for the clean up either way, but doing it this way allows them to recover some of those costs. If that helps to push the net cost below what they pay today for cleaning up, that's a win for everyone involved. We get a cleaner environment faster, the ecosystem suffers less damage thanks to the complete removal of the oil (as opposed to the introduction of oil-neutralizing chemicals), the cost of oil doesn't take as much of a hit if the spill affects supply, and the total
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Not so. They're going to have to pay for the clean up either way, but doing it this way allows them to recover some of those costs.
You're still assuming the cost of cleanup, separation, and treating is less than the cost of just dumping it into an incinerator.
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Dumping it into an incinerator is still a win compared to the thousands or millions of barrels of oil covering the bed of the Gulf of Mexico that we have today.
Besides which, the process you described is already pretty much what they already do, since they're having to remove condensation, fracking liquids, or a variety of other materials from the oil anyway. Given that they already have the process in place to do exactly that, I see no reason why they'd just burn it instead.
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Dumping it into an incinerator is still a win compared to the thousands or millions of barrels of oil covering the bed of the Gulf of Mexico that we have today.
Now you're assuming that we will get the stuff from the bed. Nope, this won't change a drop of oil in the ocean. It will change the number of sorbents in the incinerator which is a net positive for the environment but not necessarily a reduction in oil.
Besides which, the process you described is already pretty much what they already do, since they're having to remove condensation, fracking liquids, or a variety of other materials from the oil anyway. Given that they already have the process in place to do exactly that, I see no reason why they'd just burn it instead.
These systems are designed for a specific and narrow range of mixes in mind. You can't simple dump the crap you pick up out of the Gulf into any oily water separator on a large spill. You need to design a treating system and waste system to manage pretty much
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It's actually easy to get things going here. Shoot the CEO after a month if there isn't any progress in the cleanup. Then continue with the board, one per month, until the spill is cleaned up.
You will get results quickly. I guarantee you that.
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another version (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'd hate to think that this wasn't the revolutionary product that the article is claiming. Surely we would never be mislead by the internet.
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Other materials (Score:1)
This is very cool, and I hope it can enter production soon. That said, how well does it work on other materials? i.e. if an oil spill has already made it to land, can these be used to clean up beaches? What about other flotsam that may be in the area of a spill?
No matter what, it appears to be better than anything else at the moment, but I'd be interested in how it does outside of a pristine environment.
Teenagers rejoice! (Score:1)
Those are some crappy paper towels, there (Score:2)