Too Oily in the Mourning

When I was a teenager, as the stepson of a U.S. diplomat stationed in Beirut, Lebanon, I loved the swelling surf, the magnificent beaches looking across the vast Mediterranean. Quite a treat for a boy raised in Washington, D.C. I swam, body surfed and generally enjoyed the warm and welcoming waters and pure sandy beaches. And then it happened. The pipeline that carried crude across vast stretches of land, from Saudi Arabia, ended in terminals north and south in Lebanon, burst at the coastline. The final stretch engendered pipelines from shore to ship, oil destined for European ports, which loaded offshore tankers, was an undersea connection. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil spilled from this underwater leak, spreading far and wide before the outflow was stopped. 

My last two years in Beirut were changed. The clean-up was futile at best. We routinely had to wash our feet and bodies with gasoline to remove the tar that seemed to become a permanent fixture on every beach, festering offshore with littoral malevolence. The corpses of tarred birds and agonizing fish routinely washed up on those once pristine beaches. If this is what I could see, I wondered how horrible the decimation was that I could not see. 

Decades later, from the Exon Valdez to the Deepwater Horizon, our systems to contain and control oil spills just never seemed sufficient or effective. Hard dollar damages were always in the billions, assuming you could put a real price on permanent environmental damage, sea creatures (from the ocean and the air) facing horrific deaths, livelihoods lost, land and sea floors destroyed… and still our never-ending thirst for oil – even as the push for alternative energy to stem climate change rises – seems to justify continued massive environmental risks. If we are pledged to continue this oceanic exploration and risky pipeline expansion, why have we simply been unable to figure out how to clean up our messes satisfactorily?

At the end of May, continuing into June, a cargo ship, the MV X-Press Pearl, laden with chemicals and oil-filled fuel tanks, caught fire and ultimately sank off the coast of Sri Lanka. The toxic contents began to spread quickly. “The government has banned fishing, a crucial economic industry, along about 50 miles of coast in the wake of the incident. Authorities have also deployed hundreds of soldiers to clean beaches and have warned residents not to touch the debris because it could be contaminated with harmful chemicals.” NBC News, June 2nd. Fierce winds in the region have created a higher-than-normal regional fire risk for passing vessels. Just last fall, in the same area, the MT New Diamond, carrying 2 million barrels of oil, caught fire; the burning hulk was towed before the potential oil spill occurred. In short, it happens all the time. Everywhere where oil is extracted and where and how it is transported.

The response, a bit of the same-old/same-old, kicked in. Adele Peters, writing for the June 4th FastCompany.com, embellishes: “The government is readying oil dispersants, booms, and oil skimmers, all tools that were used in the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. They didn’t work perfectly then—more than 1,000 miles of shoreline were polluted—and more than a decade later, they’re still commonly used. But solutions that might work better are under development, including reusable sponges that can suck up oil both on the surface and underwater…

“[One] common tool now, are chemicals designed to break up the oil into tiny droplets so that, in theory, microorganisms in the water can break down the oil more easily. But at least one study found that dispersant could harm those organisms. Deep-sea coral also appears to suffer more from the mix of dispersant and oil than oil alone. Booms are designed to contain oil on the surface so it can be scraped off with a skimmer, but that only works if the water’s relatively calm, and it doesn’t deal with oil below the surface. The oil on the surface can also be burned, but it creates a plume of thick black smoke. ‘That does get rid of the oil from the water, but then it turns a water pollution problem into an air pollution problem,’ says Seth Darling, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory who developed an alternative called the Oleo Sponge.

“The sponge, a modified version of foam, is oleophilic, meaning oil is drawn to it, and can soak up oil even below the surface of the water. When it’s fully saturated with oil, it can be wrung out, the oil can be put to another use, and the sponge can be reused. It could be built into a type of skimmer that runs over the surface of the water like a conveyor belt…

“Researchers at Northwestern University developed another reusable sponge with a magnetic coating that also attracts oil, absorbing more than 30 times its own weight. It can be reused up to 40 times. The efficiency means that it can be carried on board a ship, something that the developers think should be mandatory. ‘If you look at a typical boat ride, you’re required by law to have life vests on board,’ says Vinayak Dravid, a materials science and engineering professor at Northwestern, who spun the technology into a startup called MFNS Tech. ‘When you are carrying toxic cargo, there [should also] be some mitigation strategy in place on board. Right now, a disaster happens, you call, and then by the time help arrives, the poisons disperse and have already gone to the shore. And it’s a cleanup for years and years.’ The team ran a large test in March and will soon release a report that shows that the technology performs better than anything on the market now and is cost effective, he says…

“Jacqueline Savitz, chief policy officer at the nonprofit Oceana [notes the astronomical cost: ‘These] are the hidden costs of our petrochemical economy. They’re rarely considered in making decisions about how much of this stuff we need to be using, whether it’s oil or whether it’s plastic. Then something like this happens, and everyone says, What can we do? And the answer is, well, we can stop using this stuff.  That’s the only way we’re going to end up with, you know, not having these crises in our oceans.’” It’s not just that burning fossil fuels has humongous negative consequences for the entire planet; extracting and transporting fossil fuels have their own sets of dire consequences.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when it comes to growing the petrochemical industry, perhaps it’s time to “Just say ‘no’.”