One of the more fun dangerous fossil fuel waste problems involves contaminated soils, which represent a huge problem all around the globe, not that anyone actually cares - the events in the Gulf of Mexico involving one of Amory Lovins' revenue stream sources (BP) have vanished down the memory hole.
I had fun with some dangerous fossil fuel waste on my own property some years back, involving some people who mistakenly delivered oil to my house - my oil tank was historical and not active - and then charged my neighbors for the delivery. The contamination from this delivery, ended up costing me, out of pocket, more than $5,000. I was, um, lucky. Some people actually lose their homes in New Jersey because of this sort of thing.
They hauled away all of the oil contaminated soil at my house - I wondered where they took it - in giant dump trucks, and then filled the hole with "clean fill" - and I have no idea whether it was clean or not. It's directly over my well.
The paper from the primary scientific literature I will discuss today...
...is found in the "ASAP" section of the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society, the largest scientific community in the world.
I do realize that it is far more relevant to discuss things like Post-Chernobyl Radionuclide Distributions in an Austrian Cow, but in the spirit of fun, I thought I would discuss the many cubic kilometers of soil contaminated with dangerous fossil fuels - including that along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico (and the sand under the Gulf of Mexico) in hopes that someone might actually give a rat's ass - recognizing that it is nowhere near as important as the Austrian Cow that is a warning to all of humanity.
The abstract of the paper may be accessed here: Self-Sustaining Smoldering Combustion for NAPL Remediation: Laboratory Evaluation of Process Sensitivity to Key Parameters
It touches on the remediation of soils contaminated by dangerous fossil fuels, and also soils contaminated by solvents used in the semi-conductor (and other) industries, such as halogenated biphenyls, chloroalkanes and chloroalkenes, etc, etc.
As they were hauling away the soil over my well, I was kind of wondering what, exactly they were going to do with it. When I asked the drivers and workers from the company that was charging me for this adventure, their answer was "to an approved landfill." It left me vaguely unsatisfied, but being somewhat morally deficient, I didn't press the issue because - truth be told - I didn't have unlimited resources to assure "safe" disposal of the dangerous fossil fuel waste. I strongly suspect that wherever my soil went, it is still a danger to humanity, and will remain so for an indefinite time period, if not forever.
All I knew was that I didn't want the waste "in my front yard." It's nowhere near as easy to contain dangerous fossil fuel waste as it is to contain used nuclear fuel. As it happens - this is a continual source of amusement - I wouldn't actually care about used nuclear fuel being "in my backyard," the commentary of people who know no nuclear science, hate nuclear science on the grounds it's clearly over their tiny heads, notwithstanding. Such people often show up in my diaries to propose that so called "nuclear waste" be placed "in my backyard," thinking, I suppose, that they're being witty and insightful.
To each his or her own...anyway.
Nonetheless, I did fantasize about schemes to clean the soil, but all of them were fairly energy intensive, at least in my mind.
It appears that my thoughts about the fact that remediating my dangerous fossil fuel waste, and my private speculations that it would require energy to remediate it, in this culture something that would result in even more dangerous fossil fuel waste being generated, may not have been as serious as I supposed, if the technology described in the paper is, in fact, viable.
To wit, the Canadian scientists who authored this paper, suggest that contaminated soils may actually contain enough energy to remediate themselves. This is probably relevant to Canadians, since Suncor, the tar sands company that also provides a revenue stream for Amory Lovins, operates in their country, generating huge amounts of well, contaminated soils.
Some excerpts from the paper, beginning with the introduction (always a good place to begin).
Nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) are a class of organic compounds that are among the most frequently occurring subsurface contaminants throughout the industrialized world. Common NAPLs include petroleum hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, chlorinated ethenes, creosote, and coal tar. Due to their physical and chemical properties, most of these contaminants represent a significant threat to the human health and the environment. Conventional remediation technologies such as pump and treat and soil vapor extraction have proven largely inefficient in addressing subsurface contamination present as NAPL. In particular, remediation of the most complex, long chain and/or less volatile NAPLs (e.g., coal tar, heavy petrochemicals) remains a significant challenge. Excavation and either disposal to hazardous waste landfill or incineration is the most common approach, entailing substantial cost and representing practices that score poorly in sustainability assessments...1
.
The bold is mine, and refers to the fact that remediating dangerous fossil fuel waste is actually not actually practiced on this planet, and represents movement - in my case - from my front yard to someone else's backyard, probably the backyard of poor people about whom the powers that be couldn't care less.
To continue:
...A recently introduced alternative approach is NAPL smoldering combustion.2 At the basis of this concept is the observation that many common NAPLs are highly flammable and exhibit heats of combustion in excess of materials that are successfully burned in other industries (e.g., biomass energy, waste incineration).3 However, since NAPLs in the environment occur as liquids embedded in a solid matrix, conventional incineration techniques (involving flaming combustion, a gas phase oxidation reaction) require a continuous supply of an external energy input. Smoldering combustion differs from these techniques in that it is the exothermic oxidation of a condensed (i.e., solid or liquid) phase occurring on the fuel’s surface...
The experimental conditions described in the paper involved the use of injection of oxygen enriched air, and also the use - for evaluation purposes - of low air content. They examined nineteen types of contaminated soils contaminated with crude oil and coal tar, and of these, only four could not be made to burn themselves and in the process, remediate themselves by essentially, burning to form the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, which is routinely dumped in the planet's atmosphere.
Contamination levels of these soils was reduced from values as high as 71,000 mg/kg of soil (with coal tar) to less than 1.5 mg/kg of coal tar.
That's um, good news. However the oxygen enriching process would, in fact, require energy. (I recently wrote a diary here about thermal enrichment of oxygen that might someday be accessible without the use of dangerous fossil fuels, but right now that's not industrial practice generally, except where nuclear electricity is in wide use.)
Parameters that effect the effectiveness of this procedure include porosity of the soil, its chemical makeup - including water levels - grain size, etc, etc.
Many of the smoldering soils in the lab experiments generated temperatures in the range of 900oC to 1100oC. This an effective temperature, even in the presence of water, to effectively decompose many toxic carbon compounds comprising dangerous fossil fuel waste.
This a brief, throwaway diary, but I thought someone might be interested in this.
Have a nice day.