Unprecedented are the devastation and loss-both to human life and to offshore drilling and production structures-following the double blow of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita this year. Oil and gas producers continue to assess the storms’ damage while trying to bring lost production back online from the battered Gulf of Mexico.
Separately, the storms prompted some companies from outside the energy industry to examine the use of certain technologies to handle other damage that might have occurred on a grand scale due to storms, such as oil spills.
One such company is Interface Sciences Corp. (ISC), Santa Barbara, Calif., which reported last month following Katrina that it was lifting the lid early on a proprietary oil-remediation and recovery method that uses nanotechnology to recover and reuse oil spilled during cataclysmic events.
ISC-a development-stage nanotechnology commercialization company holding platform technologies originally developed by a major government laboratory-has synthetically recreated nature’s ability to produce self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) up to several microscopic layers thick, depending on the application.
“Self-assembly occurs abundantly in nature even within our own bodies,” the company explained. “Different molecules within the body result in the formation of a wide variety of microstructures.”
The new oil cleanup method uses the company’s patented SAMs technology. Treated material made by ISC absorbs about 40 times its weight in oil, the company explained, “far exceeding existing commercially available remediation materials.” Water is completely rejected by the ISC material, which means that the recovered oil can be reused, marking “a substantial benefit in oil-spill cleanup efforts,” the company said.
The method
ISC Chief Executive Officer Mitch Hawkins said the company wanted to make this “highly effective material” widely available to help lessen the environmental and health effects of the average 3,000 spills/year worldwide, “and in particular oil spill damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.”
ISC emphasizes materials and surface innovation at the nanoscale. It controls several hundred technological applications and works in fields as varied as oil-spill remediation, fiber composites and composite structures, computer circuit boards, sports equipment, nanoparticle functionalization, and paper treatments.
ISC explained, “The marriage of nanoparticulates and SAMs provides direct access to a new class of nanostructured hybrid materials that are very useful as environmental sorbent materials, structural components, coatings, wetting control, friction and lubrication control, adhesion, biorelated applications...sensing/detection, environmental remediation, and electronics materials.”
The usefulness of the SAMs system, ISC noted, “is its ability to form chemical foundations from which other building blocks can be used to form more-complex structures.”
Bad timing
The storms’ timing hampered ISC’s attempt to clean up any of the storm-related spills, which were minimal after Katrina and Rita. After the first of the two major storms hit the Gulf Coast, ISC released its technology-6 months ahead of its originally planned roll-out. Therefore, according to ISC Pres. and Chief Operating Officer Chuck Fishel, the company was not prepared to produce high volumes of the material. The company felt it best, however, to make the material available to the industry on an emergency basis because of the storms, it said.
Fishel explained that the company probably could have generated enough of its material for use with environmental cleanup of wildlife, but that it would have to seek further capital resources to manufacture and distribute the material in mass quantities for use in any future large leaks or spills.✦