Cheap, Reusable Sponge Reinvents Oil Spill Cleanups

The Oleo Sponge soaking up oil in field tests. (Image courtesy of Argonne National Lab.)

Seven years ago, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon drilling pipe blew out. Over the months that followed, agencies from across the government scrambled to cap the leaking pipe and then begin the process of cleaning up the millions of gallons of leaked oil.

However, after investigating, spill recovery personnel found that not all of the oil being released from the ocean deep was collecting on the surface. Some of that oil was floating in a large plume beneath the surface. That was going to make the cleanup more difficult.

With those circumstances in mind, researchers at Argonne National Lab began building a new sponge device that can make cleaning up surface and sub-surface spills easy and inexpensive to mop up.

Called the Oleo Sponge, this unique scrubber is reusable, can discriminate between water and oil and gives recovery teams the chance to preserve any oil that’s escapes its intended confines. Built from common polyurethane foam found in furniture and home insulation and a thin layer of metal oxides near the foam’s interior surfaces, the Oleo Sponge can slurp up oil and hold it in place without taking on water.

The reason the foam can be so discriminant about what it takes on has everything to do with the nanostructure of metal oxides that have a particular affinity for oil. In previous research, Seth Darling and Jeff Elam, both chemists with Argonne, developed a technique for creating hard metal atoms that have a complicated nanostructures. With these nanostructures in place, the hard metal primer inside the foam has tons of surface area to soak up any oil that it comes in contact with.

“The Oleo Sponge offers a set of possibilities that, as far as we know, are unprecedented,” said Darling. “The material is extremely sturdy. We’ve run dozens to hundreds of tests, wringing it out each time, and we have yet to see it break down at all”.

Beyond its use in cataclysms, the Oleo Sponge could also be used in the routine cleanup of harbors and ports where continuous and tiny spills of diesel pollute the waterways. So maybe one day there will be no excuse for the putrid waterways that surround many busy coastal cities.

For a very different approach to the fight against pollution, read about Mapping Oil Spills with Swarms of Drones.