University scientists have developed a reagent for removing oil spills in the Arctic

Scientists from the Department of General and Applied Chemistry of Gubkin University have developed an environmentally friendly reagent for removing oil spills in Arctic conditions. The authors used phospholipids, the molecules that make up the membranes of all living cells, and isobutanol alcohol as a basis. In an experiment, the proposed composition made it possible to reduce the area of ​​an oil slick by 89–93% in just one minute, both at room (22°C) and at low (0°C and 7°C) temperatures. Thanks to this, the new reagent can become an effective means of cleaning Arctic seas from oil spills. The results of the study, supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), were published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

Oil fields are being actively developed in the Arctic seas, and the activities of extracting and transporting this raw material are associated with the risk of oil spills. Oil spills can cause significant damage to aquatic ecosystems that are already sensitive to human activity. This is due to the fact that oil has a toxic effect on fish and other marine life, and also impairs the supply of oxygen to the water. Therefore, technologies for cleaning up seas from oil spills are especially relevant for the Arctic region.

Scientists from the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas (National Research University), the Federal Research Center "Krasnoyarsk Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences", the A.V. Topchiev Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the N.S. Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences have developed environmentally friendly reagents for collecting oil and oil products, which reduce the area of ​​spills by pulling the thin oil film on the water to a thickness at which it can be collected with special devices - skimmers - or burned.

Change in oil film thickness after adding the reagent at 0°C, 7°C and 22°C

The finished reagent consists of phospholipids isolated from crushed soybeans - a cheap and accessible raw material - and isobutyl alcohol. Phospholipids are compounds that make up the membranes of any living cells. The resulting reagent easily decomposes in the environment, and therefore does not pollute it.

Effect of the proposed reagent on a model oil spill

The authors simulated an oil spill by pouring an oil sample into a container with water at room temperature (about 22°C) and cooled to 0°C and 7°C. After the oil slicks spread over the surface of the water, the researchers applied the synthesized reagent to the water.

The experiment showed that within one minute after application, the reagent reduced the area of ​​the oil slick by 93% at room temperature and by 89% when cooled. In this case, the thickness of the oil film increased by 1.6–2.6 times (from 0.1 to 1.6–2.6 millimeters) due to its compression into a denser layer. With such a thickness of the oil film, it can already be removed from the water surface by oil collection equipment or, without extraction, burned at the spill site. Therefore, reagents capable of increasing the film thickness to one millimeter or more are considered effective. When it is impossible to limit the spread of an oil slick with floating booms, the only way to increase the thickness of the oil film is to use oil collector reagents.

In addition, the authors studied for the first time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods how the reagent affects the interaction of oil with water and the formation of ice at the spill site. These approaches made it possible to determine that the presence of an oil collector reagent changes the internal structure and texture of the ice surface under the oil slick, as well as its thermophysical properties.

Thus, in water samples with oil, but without the reagent, a characteristic "bottleneck" was formed during the freezing process. This is a situation when, as water turns into ice, the water that has not yet frozen is squeezed out by the forming ice crystals in the direction of the freezing front. When using the reagent, the ice structure turned out to be different due to the fact that the displaced water was not "squeezed out", but froze inside the polycrystalline structure of the ice. It is important to understand how reagents affect the freezing and thawing of oil and water, since these processes play a significant role in the salinity balance, water circulation in the ocean, the ecology of marine life, the reflection of sunlight, heat and mass transfer in the atmosphere.

"In terms of efficiency, our reagent surpasses most known compounds for removing oil spills, while it has an important advantage - it is environmentally friendly, since it belongs to rapidly decomposable reagents. In the future, we plan to test the new composition for removing oil spills in natural conditions in order to take into account all the factors present in the natural environment, such as wind and currents,” said the head of the project supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, senior researcher at the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, associate professor of the Department of General and Applied Chemistry, PhD in Chemistry Delgir Sandzhieva.