New Sponge Can Soak Up and Release Spilled Oil Hundreds of Times (newscientist.com)

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 This so-far unpublished test was conducted in early December at the National Oil Spill Response Research and Renewable Energy Test Facility in Leonardo, New Jersey.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.

Comments

Re:Just in time

[GLMDesigns]

Pollution is an important consideration. Too much carbon spewing into the environment is a concern. But then so are jobs, the economy, starvation, wars, etc...

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 refineries makes sense in the here and now.

- Not drilling is stupid.
- Funding religious zealots does not make sense.
- There is no extra pollution to drilling here as opposed to "there." IMHO there would be less pollution if we drilled here as so many people would be concerned and paying attention.
- Using trucks and trains to send oil (compared to a pipeline) is stupid.

People who are opposed to the pipeline are doing so for ideological purposes.

We need the oil NOW. Better to drill here than Saudi Arabia.