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The materials science research team from the University of Texas at Austin is a winner of the 2024 Gizmodo Science Fair for developing a faster and more efficient system to clean up oil spills and reuse the collected oil.
The question
Can you quickly clean up an oil spill using a method that also increases the purity of the recovered oil, thereby raising the possibility that it can be reused?
The results
A team at the University of Texas at Austin, led by Guihua Yu, a materials science professor, has developed a novel two-step system that could dramatically cut down the time it takes to clean up oil spills—from weeks to days. First, the system focuses on absorbing the oil using a device that looks like a giant paint roller. Except that, instead of distributing paint, the roller attracts the oil that’s been released in the ocean.
© Vicky Leta/Gizmodo The mesh roller is coated in a hydrophobic gel that’s meant to attract the oil and separate it from water. Doing this effectively with current cleanup methods is difficult, as skimmers often get a mixture of both oil and water when they’re sent out to sea to respond to an incident. The gel, however, allows them to attract the oil without the water.
Many spills involve crude oil, the form oil is in right after extraction, before it’s been refined into products such as gasoline or jet fuel. Crude oil has a high viscosity, which means it’s very sticky and can be hard to separate from water. To address this, Yu and his team thought of another new approach: heating it up.
Using non-contact induction heating, the researchers heat the crude oil to around 194 degrees Fahrenheit (90 Celsius), which greatly decreases the oil’s viscosity and makes it become more fluid. This allows it to pass easily through the mesh in the roller and into a collector that sits beneath the drum. The entire process is continuous, minimizing the time spent on the cleanup. In practice, the researchers believe the rollers could be attached to large boats, which would pull them across an area with a spill and allow them to absorb and collect the oil.
This two-step system achieved a 99% oil-water separation efficiency in lab experiments. The team claims the method is almost 10 times faster than traditional oil skimmers used for ocean cleanup.
Why they did it
Yu got the idea to develop a more efficient technology to clean up oil after the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The disaster, which killed 11 people and countless marine animals, is the largest accidental oil spill in history, resulting in the release of more than 210 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. Oil gushed into the gulf for 87 days and covered 57,000 square miles (149,000 square kilometers) of the ocean. The cleanup took years and restoration projects are ongoing.
Ke Yan, who worked with Yu on the project and is now a professor at Nanjing University in China, told Gizmodo that he was similarly inspired.
An illustration of the separation process. © University of Texas-Austin “Many years ago, an image of a real oil spill disaster deeply impacted me, where massive dead marine animals were floating on the sea or densely packed everywhere on the beach. I was encouraged to do something to make a change by using my expertise,” Yan said, adding that “Prof. Yu provided me with the opportunity to combine materials science and oil spill cleanup research to make a change.”
Considering how often spills occur and the threats they pose, Yu began analyzing the methods used to clean up oil. He was especially drawn to oil skimmers, which use a variety of techniques to remove oil from the surface of the water, including portable dams to trap the oil and suction.
“[The oil skimmer] requires significant effort and is also very time consuming. The skimmer also hasn’t changed for decades, and it’s not efficient, especially when it comes to very large oil spills,” Yu said. “So, we started thinking, what is the challenge?”
As a father, the project was personal on a deeper level to Yu. “I have three kids, and having a Mother Earth that is able to sustain itself in the future for many generations to come is an important part of my work,” he said.
Why they’re a winner
While the number of large oil spills has decreased over the years, there are still many small oil spills that also cause damage. The consequences are more pronounced when they occur in sensitive environments, such as beaches and wetlands.
Oil spills can cause catastrophic and irreversible damage to ocean ecosystems. Furthermore, cleaning up an oil spill as quickly as possible is critical, because it prevents the oil from reaching coastlines and spreading, making it harder to remove. At the moment, small and medium cleanups can take days or weeks. In the case of large spills like Deepwater Horizon, it can even take years. Most existing technologies struggle when cleaning up oils with high viscosities, which can be sticky and even immovable.
The team’s new roller method could be a game changer for oil spill cleanup, greatly reducing the time it takes to clean up the spill and recovering nearly 99% of the oil released. This reduced timeline and increased efficiency means environmental recovery can begin faster. There’s also another upside: The oil they collect can be reused.
What’s next
Yu said the research has generated a lot of interest from oil companies. However, it’s not ready to be deployed out on the sea just yet. So far, they’ve managed to achieve positive results in lab settings and are working on scaling up the technology to be able to tackle the huge areas involved in oil spills.
Scaling up also involves tinkering with the chemistry of the gel used on the rollers to ensure it’s stable on a larger scale and conducting more tests of the technology in simulated conditions.
The UT-Austin professor is also limited by human resources. Yu carried out the project with the help of his graduate students, many of whom are no longer at the university and have moved on to the next step in their careers. While Yu is thrilled for his former students and understands that moving on is part of their scientific education, it adds more time to his research because he has to train new pupils and get them up to speed before he can work on advancing.
Yu said he hopes to be able to share the technology with industry partners and test out in real situations sometime in 2025.
The team
The project team comprised Yu, who led the research, as well as former PhD scholars Ke Yan and Fei Zhao. Yan and Zhao are currently professors at Nanjing University and the Beijing Institute of Technology, respectively. It also included professors Lijia Pan, Yongchang Jiang, and Yi Shi from Nanjing University in China. UT engineering professor Kishore Mohanty helped the team procure raw viscous oil for their lab experiments.
Click here to see all of the winners of the 2024 Gizmodo Science Fair.
