MIT develops new magnetic technology for oil spills
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico led to the development of many new cleanup technologies. MIT researchers say they have developed a cost-efficient way of using magnets to separate oil and water that could be used in oil spill cleanups, Ship & Bunker reports.
The method, involving mixing water-repellant ferrous nanoparticles with the oil and then using magnets to pull the oil away from the water, would probably be performed on an oil-recovery vessel to avoid contaminating the area with the nanoparticles.
MIT postdoctoral researcher Shahriar Khushrushahi, who was the lead author of the paper, said that in choppy water, skimmers used in oil spill cleanups remove a mixture of half water and half oil, and the new technology would offer a way to efficiently separate the oil out.
The test devices used by the researchers involved a magnet immersed in a water-oil mixture in such a way that the magnetized oil would shoot to the top where it could be removed.
"The process may seem simple," Khushrushahi said, "But it is, inherently, supposed to be simple."
Current methods of removing oil from spill areas are limited, according to Ronald Rosensweig, a former Exxon researcher who has written about ferrofluids.
"This oil-spill problem has not really been worked on intensively that I know of, and of course it's a big problem," Rosensweig said.
"You could think of separating oil from water by centrifuging or something like that, but in a lot of cases, the fluids are pretty much equal in density: Some of the oil sinks, some of it floats, and a lot of it is in between.
"The magnetic hook could, hopefully, make separation faster and better."
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico spurred many new research efforts around oil spill cleanups, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency receiving tens of thousands of submissions for new "spill-killers" in 2010 alone, according to CNBC.
Cleaning up spills that never reach shore can cost over $3,000 per metric ton of oil.
