Peat Absorbs Oil

February 13, 2006

Oil and oil products spill often and in various places. These are plots in oil production areas and pipeline breaking locations and places of tanker wracks or crashes of consists, which carry oil products. At best, oil spillage falls on hard soil: it can be collected and somehow refined or, at the worst, buried. The case is much worse if the spillage takes place on water.

The oil film spreads out quickly to large distances, and it is very uneasy to collect. A thick film is removed by sea bulldozers by “scraping it off” water surface. As for a thin film, which produces iridescent spots, it is practically impossible to eliminate. By the way, its emergence does not require any disastrous events at all: a film may drift behind an ordinary motor-launch if its engine does not run well. A film several microns thick may seem to produce little impact. For water inhabitants, it emergence can mean certain death: it reduces oxygen dissolving in water drastically.

Therefore, the problem of fighting oil film is more than urgent. There is only one remedy for it: sorbent that is capable of taking in oil products. It is also desirable that the sorbent itself did not contaminate the environment and was able to turn carbohydrates into something quite harmless. Researchers of three institutes – Snezhinsk All-Russian Scientific Research Institite of Technical Physics (VNIITF), Novosibirsk State Research Center “Vector” and the Syktyvkar Institute of Biology (Komi Research Center, Ural Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences) with financial support from the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) – managed to combine all three components of an ideal sorbent. Significant assistance was also provided by the US colleagues. Furthermore, the partner of the project – the Kirov Center for Ecological Initiatives “Press-Torf (Peat)” – even arranged production of sorbent trial lots.

The sorbent is based on peat – one of the most widespread materials in Russia, particularly in the North. Generated from remains of plants, peat doesn't contaminate the environment by any means. Being an interim link in a series of carbohydrates transformations, which begin from dead plants and finish with anthracite, peat itself is capable of taking in oil rather well. After burning at definite temperatures (which are object of know-how), peat becomes so porous that each of its finest particles is able to absorb several times more oil film than it weighs.

However, there is a significant difficulty in working with peat: sorbent turns out to be very lightweight, it is extremely hard to disperse evenly across a large area. The task has been solved by engineers from Snezhinsk. They made special proportioning bunkers of different sizes: from the manual or, more precisely, shoulder option, reminding of a garden sprayer, through to industrial one, which is fixed on a fire-engine or a special motor-launch. The first modification fits oil-field workers, the bosses of which wish voluntarily or not (under the pressure of public opinion concerned with environment protection) to maintain cleanness in the area of oil well. The second modification is needed for purification of large water bodies’ surface. For example, the motor-launch with such a bunker on board proved itself very well during purification of the Neva river surface near the Palace Embankment. It is important to note that the sorbent is hydrophobic, i.e. it preserves floatation after it gets saturated with oil within several weeks, this fact allowing to collect it from water surface in a mechanical way using standard technology.

However, creation of the sorbent was only the first part of the effort. Biologist were involved in the second part. It is known that there are quite a lot of bacteria capable of eating up oil. Moreover, biologists are well aware of the cultures that do that best of all and are well adaptated to life in certain climatic conditions. Biologists from Syktyvkar and Novosibirsk were engaged in cultivation of such bacteria in particular, or more precisely, in selection of their correct community, including microfungi. They managed not only to select such a community, but also to develop technology for its growing and distribution in the peat sorbent. In case of using biosorbent, absorbed oil products are decomposed by oil destructor microorganisms within spring and summer period, which was confirmed by field trials carried out at the Usinsky oil field. The cost of such sorbent will certainly be much higher than that of a common one, but it guarantees complete and rapid decomposition of oil products.

Source: Informnauka Agency