Biofuel Spill Recovery from Water : With a Focus on Sorbing Materials

Abstract

Oil spills into natural water bodies are common environmental disasters and there is a plethora of well-researched and generally accepted methods and technologies for dealing with this problem. An extensive legislative apparatus also exists to prevent these occurrences and ensure the liable parties defray the costs of such catastrophes. With the increasing production volumes of renewable fuels, the question arises of whether it is a viable option to apply the same recovery methods and legislative standards to some little-researched fuels and their unpredictable behaviour. The research done for this thesis consisted of investigating how biofuels can be recovered and what legal matters this entails. Oil spills recovery operations most often rely on applying skimmers, sorbing materials, booms and burning the fuel. This thesis consists of conducting a theoretical study of the existing methods and testing protocols for conventional fuels, especially those that have to do with sorbent materials, and developing laboratory tests that would provide us with the information of how the problem of mitigating biofuel water spills could be approached. Five different fuels were tested in the laboratory, amongst them three renewable fuels – NExBTL (provided to us by Neste Oyj), pyrolysis oil (provided by Fortum Oyj) and ethanol blended gasoline E85 . Two other fuels were conventional diesel and gasoline. NExBTL is a renewable diesel that is very similar chemically to conventional diesel. E85 dissolves in water and pyrolysis oil has a very complex and little-studied behaviour when added to water. Part of it completely dissolves in the upper layer with a dense tarry layer emerging on the bottom. This makes recovery of these two fuels impossible by applying the current technology that is widely used. Another big issue that this bring us to is the necessity to classify these fuels differently in environmental protection legislature created for fuel spills. One possibility for mitigating a pyrolysis oil spill could be of biological nature in order to speed up biodegradation.