As Virginia considers allowing drilling for oil off its coast, scientists at the University of Mary Washington are doing basic research that could prove valuable in the event of a spill. Sandy Hausman reports on what they hope to learn after two weeks of trolling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
For most people, an ocean cruise is vacation.
For Charlie Sharpless, two weeks on the Gulf of Mexico was work.
The chairman of the University of Mary Washington’s chemistry department joined scientists from Woodshole, Bigelow, and UC Santa Barbara to collect oil samples for study in the lab. Their goal is to figure out what happens to petroleum when it comes in contact with sea water, air and sunlight. They know it gives off carbon-dioxide.
“And there was a pretty obvious progression of what started out as light, sweet crude turning into just tar balls.”
Learning more about how and why oil degrades is important, Sharpless says, not only because of manmade oil spills, but because up to ten times the amount of petroleum leaks from beneath the ocean floor.
“There’s a lot of oil we don’t know about that’s just coming up slowly in places in the wide open ocean. The year of the Deep Water Horizon spill happened, maybe we equaled natural inputs to the marine system.”
Understanding how nature deals with that form of pollution could lead to better approaches when manmade spills occur.
“If you’re an engineer who’s trying to clean things up, and you have a better sense of just how quickly these photochemical reactions might impact the oil composition and quality, it might change the approach you take to the cleanup. If you’re trying to design a polymer that not only blocks the oil but also absorbs it, you need to take into account how quickly the stuff turns into tar.”
Now, Sharpless and his research team are shining light on the oil samples in their laboratory - hoping next year to publish findings on how oil ages and degrades.
