An Effective Oil Dispersant Made From Ingredients in Peanut Butter, Chocolate and Whipped Cream

“Other sci­en­tists are work­ing on new oil dis­per­sants and absorbents, but noth­ing that’s quite like ours. It not only breaks up oil but pre­vents the depo­si­tion of oil on birds and other objects, like the ingre­di­ents in laun­dry deter­gent keep grease from rede­posit­ing on cloth­ing in the rinse cycle. Birds can sit in slicks of the dis­persed oil, they can dive through it and take off and flap their wings, and the oil will fall off.”

Kemp’s col­league, Robert Lochhead, Ph.D., devel­oped the con­cept for the new dis­per­sant, and the research team now has moved the mate­r­ial from con­cept to a pro­to­type dis­per­sant suit­able for test­ing on actual oil spills. The team, which also includes Drs. Sarah Morgan, Dan Savin and Les Goff, is at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.

Lochhead said the new dis­per­sant is based on sci­en­tific prin­ci­ples estab­lished decades ago dur­ing the devel­op­ment of mod­ern laun­dry deter­gents. One ingre­di­ent, for instance, is a spe­cial poly­mer that sticks to the sur­face of oil droplets to keep them from stick­ing to the feath­ers of sea birds. Similar poly­mers in laun­dry deter­gents keep oil and grease removed dur­ing the wash cycle from get­ting back on cloth­ing dur­ing the rinse cycle.

That fea­ture in the new dis­per­sant would be crit­i­cal for min­i­miz­ing dam­age to wildlife and beaches, Kemp noted. When deter­gents are used to remove oil that has coated fur or feath­ers, it defeats their nat­ural water­proof­ing effect, leav­ing birds less buoy­ant and more sus­cep­ti­ble to hypother­mia. Birds can also eat the oil as they try to clean them­selves, caus­ing inter­nal dam­age. By some esti­mates, almost 225,000 birds died in this way after being cov­ered in oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska.

Another impor­tant advan­tage, Kemp noted, is the ease of quickly obtain­ing large amounts of ingre­di­ents, even ton quan­ti­ties, for mak­ing the oil dis­per­sant at rea­son­able cost. She envi­sioned agen­cies like the U.S. Coast Guard keep­ing small amounts on hand for first response, with larger quan­ti­ties being quickly made as necessary.

With fund­ing from the National Science Foundation (IIP-1127846), Kemp helped the group move from the pro­to­type they had devel­oped in the lab to a ver­sion that would be ready to be tested and approved for use with future oil spills. The group used a robotic device to quickly screen thou­sands of pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tions until they set­tled on a win­ning formula.

The team had sup­port from large chem­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers, includ­ing The Dow Chemical Company, Archer Daniels Midland Company and Croda International for ingre­di­ent selec­tion and sup­ply. In order to move to com­mer­cial­iza­tion of this tech­nol­ogy, it will now be nec­es­sary to seek part­ners and end-use cus­tomers with inter­est in test­ing the product.

Source: American Chemical Society release