Oil Spills Are NOT Acceptable

Petroleum became a major industry following the oil discovery at Oil Creek Pennsylvania in 1859. Most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the US was the largest oil producing country in the world. The domestic petroleum industry that began in 1859 with a well drilled just 69.5 feet deep forever changed America’s economy, the standard of living, and culture. The earliest exploration companies began seeking oil for refining into a newly invented lamp fuel called kerosene. This “rock oil” fuel was cheaper than whale oil and far safer than the more popular but explosive fuel, camphene.

    Even though this discovery changed the way we did things back in the 19th and 20th century, an oil spill is extremely dangerous. And one in the Ocean is even worse. Elastec is an organization that designs solutions to clean massive oil spills like in this picture. This picture is of a crashed ship that spilled just over 400,000 gallons of Heavy Fuel Oil. As you can tell, that's a lot of oil and a lot of fire. But do you see how they are containing it? They are using a very large boom to contain the oil and bring it back to a containment center or to a ship that carries it to where it needs to be. 

 My team's solution is like this. The Interceptor 004 is an autonomous robot that collects plastic out of rivers with a boom like a guide to collect the plastic and put it in a bin. Our design is like this, but with a boom with foam blocks on the end instead of a plastic guide.

    The boom is made from hydrophobic oleophilic molecules attached to their rim which recover the surfaced oil and any oil that was missed. Oleophilic means that the molecules like to cling to the hydrocarbons in petroleum. And the hydrocarbons in petroleum are hydrophobic as well as the sponge, so you don’t have to worry about the water taking up any space in your foam boom. Then it returns the oil either to somewhere it can be resold or be contained for later use.

The black legos represent the oil, the long lego pieces represent the Booms, and the two tower looking pieces represent the large oil containers. I published this blog post during a school closure during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and didn't have the resources at home to create something robotic, but in my opinion, it came out pretty good for having only a couple of legos.

There are many things that you can do to help. There really isn't a way to prevent oil spills, most of them are accidents I hope, but the plastic waste problem is pretty big as well. One of my favorite and easiest to remember is the three R's. That's Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Now, do you notice that Reduce and Reuse are both before Recycle? That means Reduce the non-reusable plastic and recycle when we can't reuse it. We really shouldn't be using that much non-reusable plastic. Most of the plastic in our houses are or should be containers of some kind.

Bibliography

Elastec.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_industry_in_the_United_States

Written by Ethan