The Gulf oil leak is now contaminating 1/3 of the Gulf and becoming larger every day! With over 75 million gallons of crude oil in the Gulf, insult to injury is added by the dispersant Corexit 9500 - a chemical which contains nitrogen and phosphorus, two well-known causes of algae blooms, which subsequently kill fish, or in the case of "harmful algae blooms", can also kill people.

BP has used the traditional approaches to oil pollution cleanup:

• (i) Oil Absorbents
• (ii) Kevin Costner's Centrifuges
• (iii) Booms for Containment
• (iv) Corexit Dispersant

But no single solution has addressed the whole problem.

These methods do not provide a full scope of treatment. Physical methods will remove 95%. What happens to the other 5% or 3.5 million gallons? It persists in the environment for years! Chemical methods achieve zero treatment - these dispersants do exactly that: disperse the oil, making it impossible to physically remove. Furthermore, the actual chemical while associated nitrogen and phosphorus compounds are environmental pollutants.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Cleanup Technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.