Cleaning and Retrieval of Spilled Crude Oil and its Application as a Refinery Feedstock Using Highly Efficient Polymeric Nanofibrous Sorbents

The objectives of this project are to develop novel and more efficient materials to be used as sorbents for crude oil spills and to explore their potential for retrieval. A number of remedies have been explored for the collection of spilled crude oil, which is one of the major environmental problems. Sorbents of different forms are being used as one of these remedies. However, adsorbed oil spill and used sorbents provide a secondary source of pollution. In our laboratories, we have developed polymeric nanofibrous sorbents that showed a high affinity towards the sorption of spilled crude oil. Moreover, the water-free adsorbed oil as well as the used sorbent were completely recycled into a homogenous solution that can be added to the refinery feedstock. Polymeric materials of various origins were converted into micro- and nanofibrous sorbents using a novel nanotechnology approach. Those fibers are characterized by their high surface area, and interconnected porosities. The homogeneity of the fiber size and pore size distributions was optimized in order to maintain a high degree of reproducibility. Fibrous sorbents were therefor applied to crude oil spills that were intentionally made over a simulated sea water medium. Results showed that sorption of the crude oil spill started within seconds of contact between the fibrous sorbent and the spilled oil. The water-free adsorbed oil showed a sorption capacity of up to 217 g/g of the fibrous sorbent. Moreover, the adsorbed oil as well as the used fibrous sorbent were completely converted to a homogeneous solution that can be directly forwarded as a feedstock to the refinery, hence provide a high economic value of retrieving the spilled oil and minimizing secondary sources of pollution. The current approach is solely developed and tested in our laboratories and provides a more efficient approach to the cleanup and retrieval of crude oil spills from aqueous media. Our sorbents are competitively less expensive than those imported with a higher sorption efficiency. Moreover, our approach provides an additional solution to spilled oil and used sorbents through their recycling and re-use in the refinery feedstock.