New Oil Cleanup Technologies Face Crucial Test in Gulf

Peculiarities of the Persian Gulf--and the fact that there’s a war going on--could make the sprawling oil slick there a proving ground for new cleanup technologies.

Oil-eating bugs and powders that make spills coagulate may yet have their day, according to oil cleanup experts.

“The normal methods aren’t likely to be applied there,” Edgar Berkey, president of the National Environmental Technology Applications Corp., said Tuesday. NETAC, at the University of Pittsburgh, was set up by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to evaluate and encourage new environmental technologies.

It’s not just the size of the spill--now 40 times that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill--but also weather, water action and the war that set the gulf apart.

“The Persian Gulf is a semi-enclosed body of water, more akin to a lake than to open ocean,” Berkey said. He also cited low currents, small tides and no large-scale winter storms as characteristics that cleanup specialists will have to ponder.

But the most important factor is the war itself.

In the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, more than 11,000 people worked on spill cleanup at the height of that effort. But such methods aren’t likely to be used in a war zone.

“You are looking for techniques that are less labor intensive and that can be applied from a distance--from airplanes and ships,” Berkey said. “And that leads you to bioremediation.”

Basically, this means spreading oil-eating bacteria on a spill, a process currently available from more than 100 U.S. environmental-service companies.

Exxon Corp. adapted a French bioremediation technology under contract from the EPA for use on the Alaska spill. Storms and other natural phenomena accomplished most of the work, but some industry sources say the bacteria did as much to clean up that oil as any remedy introduced by man.

“It was certainly one of the major couple of tools that we used in that cleanup,” said John B. Wilkinson, technical coordinator for Alaska operations for Exxon Co. U.S.A.

“We produce bacteria that use hydrocarbon as a food source,” said John Zeiner, a spokesman for Austin, Tex.-based Alpha Environmental Inc. The company was negotiating Tuesday with Saudi Arabian officials over the role their bacteria might play in a cleanup.

As the bacteria eat, their numbers increase, Zeiner said. Left behind are environmentally benign carbon dioxide and fatty acids, which are “the beginning of most food chains and . . . are consumed by most marine and aquatic life,” Zeiner said.

These U.S. companies use only naturally occurring bacteria, since genetically altered versions have yet to be approved.

Alpha’s bacteria were most recently used on oil spills in Texas, one from a barge in Galveston Bay and the other from the Norwegian tanker Mega Borg, which dumped almost 4 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The bugs worked well, according to Alpha joint venture partner and spill-response firm EmTech Environmental Services Inc., of Ft. Worth.

Areas damaged by that spill last summer, particularly delicate marshland, have recovered “beautifully,” EmTech President Kirk Blackmon said. “The (marsh) grass was growing green, the water was clear, the little crabs were crawling up and down and birds were chirping.”

Berkey of NETAC confirms much of this picture, though he cautions that data from that test did not provide scientific proof that the bacteria were solely responsible.

“Something happened, and the result was that the slick went away,” said Berkey. “But you can’t prove it technically yet. We have measured optimism.”

Even less is known about a technique that uses a powder to coagulate oil in a way that makes it easier to suck or skim it off the water. The powder can be dropped from an airplane or helicopter.

Oil spills in the past have often been treated with chemical dispersants, which break up the oil, essentially mixing it with the water, the idea being to make it more easily treated by natural biological systems.

“But in the gulf, you’ve got less concern about fouling of the beaches and much greater concern about fouling the water,” said Jerry Trippe, president of General Technology Applications Inc., the Manassas, Va.-based manufacturer of the product. General Technology chairman and CEO Thomas T. Scambos was contacted last week by the U.S. Defense Dept., said Trippe, and Tuesday night was en route to Saudi Arabia for consultations with oil-spill agencies there.

Elastol, as the product was named, has been given only limited use, but again, a test in the New Haven, Conn., harbor, with a 5,000-gallon spill last summer, was reported to be promising.

“In the gulf, combining physical methods with biological methods with chemical methods, that would be the best of all possible worlds,” said NETAC’s Berkey.

Meanwhile, a federal assessment team remained in the gulf Tuesday. Most U.S. companies expected only to learn what role they might play in a spill cleanup after it returns.

In the battle to contain--not yet clean up--the spill, experts expected some oil-spill containment equipment, such as booms, to be shipped to the gulf from Europe, particularly from Norway. U.S. suppliers were contacted by Saudi and U.S. government agencies beginning a week ago.

Virtually all U.S. makers of boom and other oil-spill materials have been consulted by now, said Frank Meyers, chief executive officer of Torrance-based Kepner Plastics Fabricators Inc. Meyers’ company makes some of the largest oil-spill containment booms in the world.

“But they’ve asked us to keep everything in confidence,” Meyers said. “I can be critical about some handling of some past spills. But I think that what (U.S. agencies) are doing so far is as good as you can expect. The American public by its nature and temperament is much more impatient than our foreign counterparts.

“If we see an oil spill today, we want to see equipment there tomorrow, and this is a massive spill that will not be handled that quickly. This won’t be a day-by-day hurried thing, but a month-by-month cleanup.”