Sugar-Based Surfactant Developed for Oil Spills

City College of New York researchers led by chemist Professor George John have developed an eco-friendly biodegradable green "herding" agent that can be used to clean up light crude oil spills on water. 

Derived from the plant-based small molecules abundant in the marine environment, the new substance would potentially replace chemical herders currently in use. According to John, "the best known chemical herders are chemically stable, non-biodegradable, and hence remain in the marine ecosystem for years. Our goal was to develop an eco-friendly herding molecule as an alternative to the current silicone-based polymers”. 

Herding agents are surface-active molecules (surfactants) that when added to a liquid, such as seawater, reduce the surface tension. In the case of oil spills, when they are added along the periphery of an oil spill slick, they contract and thicken the slick or push slicks together so that they can be collected or burned.   

Earlier reports of the research indicated that John and colleagues added the compound, mixed in alcohol, to diesel oil floating on top of a saline solution. “Within five minutes, the oil had gelled into a substance thick enough to be scooped up,” he said. Then the team separated 80 percent of the oil from the gel using a vacuum distillation process.

The gelling agent developed by John’s team is environmentally benign. It uses a sugar-based molecule that can be obtained from renewable sources and is biodegradable.  In addition, only a relatively small amount of the agent – five percent of the volume of the oil being recovered – is required for the process, which handles a range of oil from crude to vegetable oil, to work.