The word petroleum comes from the ancient Greek terms petra [meaning rocks] and ‘elaion’ [meaning oil]. The “rock’s oil” has been attracting humankind for centuries and after the rise of industry, petroleum became a destined resource for human race. Not long after (and not surprisingly), petroleum became a threat to the environment and its residents in multiple aspects (politics, greenhouse gas emissions and etc.). However, the most direct negative influence of petroleum on the environment are the accidental spills during the production, transportation, distillation or use. One of the most tragic examples occurred a few years ago in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The accident is mostly referred as “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill” and it ended up releasing ~5 billion barrels petroleum from the source into the ocean. In this project, we investigate dispersants as one of the immediate responses to accidental oil spills.
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) for laboratories provide continuity in data production and enhance the reliability of produced data. In this post, I will be sharing the SOP of oil dispersion effectiveness test.
Firstly, I would like to lay-out the three components (ingredients) of oil dispersion. In our conceptual model we have: (i) spilled oil, (ii) a dispersant and (iii) elements of the background matrix. Each individual component has several parameters influencing the outcome of oil dispersion and in order to control the complexity of the system we need to first identify and then fix most of these parameters to test dispersion in a controlled manner.
(Ingredients).
Oil:
To mimic the geographical similarities between the actual oil spilled during Deepwater Horizon, Louisiana sweet crude oil is being used in out lab.
Dispersant:
Corexit was the response chemical to the Deepwater Horizon spill; therefore, it is used as the reference material to compare the dispersants. There are two types of polymers present in our lab: dendrimers (PAMAM) and hyperbranched polyethylenimine polymers (HY-PEI).
Background Matrix:
In our lab, artificial seawater is being used as the background matrix; however, it should be noted that presence of natural organic matter and other organic/inorganic constituents should be taken into account.
The oil dispersion effectiveness test protocol prepared by Kristen Carpenter is presented below:
Some of the findings from oil dispersion effectiveness test are already published in the following articles.
