MRS Energy & Sustainability: A Review Journal page 1 of 13 © Materials Research Society, 2019 doi:10.1557/mre.2019.3 Introduction On April 20 of 2010, natural gas burst from the Deepwater Horizon oil platform drill well and exploded, beginning of the largest uncontested accidental oil spill incident in history and lasting until July 15. 1 The oil well, which was owned and serviced by British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico, would spill 4.9 million barrels (686,000 metric tonnes) of crude oil over 87 days. 2,3 To attempt to contain and eventually clean such a mas- sive spill in an open-water marine environment, many factors had to be considered: the depth of the spill, the currents out at sea, water temperature, winds, and many other factors present. 2 The oil and natural gas from the ruptured wellhead was released in all directions from 5000 feet (1500+ m) underwater at between ABSTRACT There are few feasible options for sorbents, which can be quickly manufactured and deployed in the event of a major oil spill and so every oil spill is an ecological disaster. This paper aims to provide an understanding of what a realistic, full-scale crude oil spill solution would look like based on the performance of the best sorbents currently available, their costs, and their advantages. Adsorbent materials or “sorbents” described here have been a recent target for research toward applications in environmental cleanup, reme- diation, and hazardous material containment. These materials contain many compositions, syntheses, and practical manufacturing parame- ters that make most of them practically and logistically unfit to tackle quantities much larger than a single barrel of oil. Different properties of crude oil and nonpolar materials, such as their viscosity, density, and weathering, can also make these materials seem attractive on a lab scale but underperform in field testing and in practical applications. This review addresses the challenges, advantages, and disadvantages of dif- ferent technical applications of the superior sorbent materials and material types in the literature. In addition, we discuss the different costs and manufacturing challenges of sorbent materials in real oil spills and what a feasible containment sorbent material might look like. Keywords: environment; porosity; adsorption REVIEW DISCUSSION POINTS • More than 75% of the oil in large oil spills gets left behind and dissolved into the ocean. • There has been ineffective leverage to force oil companies to take responsibility for large oil spill cleanup, despite the toll these spills take on their local economies and the environment. • Large oil spills, both terrestrial and marine, continue to happen (large spills of >700 tonnes happened 1.8 times a year in the 2010s), and yet technology has not emerged to meet this challenge. Scaling sorbent materials for real oil-sorbing applications and environmental disasters Andrew Patalano, Department of Chemistry, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA Fabian Villalobos, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA Pedro Pena, Department of Chemistry, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA Evan Jauregui, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA Cengiz Ozkan, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA Mihri Ozkan, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA Address all correspondence to Andrew Patalano at apata004@ucr.edu (Received 30 April 2018; accepted 19 February 2019) https://doi.org/10.1557/mre.2019.3 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 207.241.231.83, on 09 May 2020 at 09:26:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.