DISPERSANT PERFORMANCE: FINDING NEW RESULTS IN EXISTING DATA
| Autor: | Kimberly Bittler |
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| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | International Oil Spill Conference Proceedings. 2017:704-724 |
| ISSN: | 2169-3358 2169-3366 |
| DOI: | 10.7901/2169-3358-2017.1.704 |
| Popis: | No. 092 Abstract: Chemical dispersants are used to mitigate oil spills in aquatic environments. Dispersants promote the breakdown of oil into smaller droplets that more readily diffuse into the water column. Federal agencies, industry, and academia have a long history of investigating dispersant performance at diverse scales and environmental conditions, including several recent publications. Several studies estimate dispersant performance as dispersion effectiveness (DE, measured as the percent of oil retained in the water column for a period of time after treatment), the concentration of oil in the dispersed in the water column, or the size of dispersed oil droplets. While many organizations have drawn qualitative conclusions from this body of work, a quantitative meta-analysis drawing together historic and recent research on the topic of dispersant effectiveness has not been conducted. This paper analyzed controlled studies measuring performance of dispersants across lab, tank, and large-scale studies. Although this paper examined only a subset of commonly tested oils, the findings strongly support that treatment with dispersants is correlated with increased effectiveness across several metrics, studies, and test methodologies. The conclusions provided by this analysis could be a critical tool for weighing the risks and benefits of using dispersants to respond to oil spills in aquatic environments. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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