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With the OHM sponge, Dravid said he expects the technology to be commercially available soon. The goal now, he said, is to find a partner to handle manufacturing the sponges at large scales. The scientists also tested the Oleo Sponge at a natural oil seep off the California coast, near Santa Barbara, to assess how it works in real-world environments.ĭarling said the Coast Guard and private companies have expressed interest in the Oleo Sponge. In 2017, the researchers tested the sponges in a giant seawater tank in New Jersey and demonstrated that they could collect diesel and crude oil both below and on the water's surface. And since the sponges can be reused, they are a "greener" alternative to the tools currently available. With the Oleo Sponge, Darling said it's a new type of absorbent that can sop up spills at the surface and when oil has seeped deeper into the water column.
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The idea is to remove the oil through biodegradation, in which bacteria and other microorganisms naturally feed on the oil and essentially remove it from the environment. Local officials can also spray oil slicks with dispersants, which break oil into smaller droplets that mix more easily with water.
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“It does remove a lot of oil from the water, but of course that turns a water pollution problem into an air pollution problem,” Darling said. The oil can then be skimmed off the surface, but this method is less effective in choppy waters, and waves can push oil deeper into the ocean, where it's much harder to clean.Īnother method for removing oil at the water’s surface is to burn it, but there are obvious drawbacks with employing that strategy. Scientists like Darling and Dravid are hoping to change that.Īt present, cleanup crews typically use booms to contain oil spills and prevent them from spreading. "There's been upgrades in modeling how spills move and how oil affects fish and animals in the deep ocean and marshes, but in terms of response work, there were a few things that have been tried but nothing that rose to the level of something that will be used moving forward," Pardue said. He said it's because resources are typically devoted to studying the spill sites, as well as the effect of leaked oil on the environment and plants and animals in the region, while funding for developing new cleanup tools is usually limited. "Deepwater Horizon should have driven a lot of innovation but didn't," said John Pardue, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University, who conducted research and ran an advisory program for a land trust in Louisiana in the aftermath of the 2010 spill. While satellite technologies to map and model oil spills have improved greatly since the Deepwater Horizon spill, the processes for cleanup crews on the water and on beaches have remained mostly stagnant. (MFNS-Tech)īoth Darling and Dravid said their sponges were designed to fill a gap in available technologies to clean up oil spills, offering officials a new way to respond to major incidents like the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, when an estimated 210 million gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. Image: Researchers at Northwestern University developed a reusable sponge with a magnetic coating that attracts oil and can absorb more than 30 times its own weight.