Newswise — After determining why nearly 20,000 gallons of crude oil from the Exxon Valdez are still trapped in the beaches along Prince William Sound, Temple University engineer Michel Boufadel will be returning to Alaska this summer to explore ways to remediate the remaining oil.
Boufadel, chair of civil and environmental engineering in Temple’s College of Engineering, has been awarded a one-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to investigate technologies that will enhance the natural biodegradation of the oil.
In a study published last year in the journal Nature, Boufadel concluded that a combination of low concentrations of oxygen and nutrients in the lower layers of the Sound’s beaches were slowing the biodegradation of oil. His findings were based on three years of study of the region’s beaches.
“When we got our initial funding for this project in 2007, our goal was to understand why oil was still trapped in some of the beaches,” he said. “Now that we know why, our goal is to enhance the natural rate of the oil’s breakdown in order to get it out of those beaches.”
This summer, Boufadel and a team of Temple engineering students will visit four beaches that feature different geological characteristics and different amounts of oil. They will place probes deep into the beaches to deliver chemicals designed to enhance the oil’s natural breakdown, and then evaluate the oil’s biodegradation.
He said he the chemicals will be delivered in a localized manner and will not cause any negative impact on the beaches or the surrounding areas, he added.
“We believe you can break down that oil in its current place without trying to get the oil out of the beaches to treat it,” said Boufadel. “The advantage of introducing chemical enhancements to biodegrade the oil is that it causes the least disturbance to the environment.”
Boufadel, director of Temple's Center for Natural Resources Development and Protection, said that this is the first such oil remediation investigation of coastal beaches. If this method is successful in cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil, it could be used to clean oil trapped in other impacted beaches, such as those along the Gulf of Mexico, he said.
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