Earth Day is April 22nd. What better way to celebrate than to showcase smart people who create more effective ways to fix or even prevent environmental disasters like the ones we've seen over the past 12 months?
Who will soon forget the images of spewing oil in the Gulf of Mexico, oiled birds, oil soaked wetlands, or dolphins swimming through oil?
The feeling of helplessness, and the painfully obvious lack of credible solutions available at the time, have resulted in an environmentally friendlier way to separate oil from tar sands compliments of researchers at Penn State.
This method, which utilizes ionic liquids (salt in a liquid form) to separate the heavy viscous oil from sand, is also capable of cleaning oil spills from beaches and separating oil from drill cuttings, the solid particles that must be removed from drilling fluids in oil and gas wells.
Tar sands, also known as bituminous sands or oil sands, represent approximately two-thirds of the world’s estimated oil reserves.
Canada is the world’s major producer of unconventional petroleum from sands, and the U.S. imports more than one million barrels of oil per day from Canada, about twice as much as from Saudi Arabia.
The current production of petroleum from tar sands causes considerable damage to the environment. Contaminated wastewater can seep underground and pollute lakes and rivers, and large amounts of water are required which depletes available freshwater sources.
The Penn State method uses very little energy and water, and best of all, the solvents used are recycled and reused. According to Paul Painter, professor of polymer science at Penn State:
The process can also be used to extract oil and tar from beach sand after oil spills, such as the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon incidents. Unlike other methods of cleanup, the Penn State process completely removes the hydrocarbons, and the cleaned sand can be returned to the beach instead of being sent to landfills.
In an experiment using sand polluted by the BP oil spill, the team was able to separate hydrocarbons from the sand within seconds. A small amount of water was used to clean the remaining ionic liquids from the sand, but that water was also recoverable. “It was so clean you could toss it back on the beach. Plus, the only extra energy you need is enough to stir the mixture,” said Aron Lupinsky, a researcher in Painter’s group.
A more detailed explanation of the research, along with photos and video, is posted on the departmental website: www.matse.psu.edu/news/ionicliquids.
The Materials Research Institute coordinates Penn State’s more than 200 materials-related faculty in interdisciplinary research activities, and will surely be contributing many more creative and smart environmental "fixes" in the future.
Did you know there is a Penn State iPhone app? Well, there IS!! Penn State is going to be a University worth keeping your eye on for great environmental contributions. The app is updated with Penn State news releases for those who like to get their news straight from the source.
Are you on Twitter? Follow @EarthDayNetwork for Earth Day News.
Sources: Penn State Universtiy, Newswise
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Tracy Lynn Cook is a writer in Gilbert, Arizona. To read more, please visit her blog at www.TLCsThoughts.com, or browse by topic:
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