This week marks the two year anniversary of BP’s megalithic oil spill debacle. Unlike the similarly catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, which clocked in at a mere 250- 750 thousand barrels or spillage, the Deepwater Horizon disaster not only cost 11 lives, but it also spilled a mind-boggling 4.9 million barrels of crude, which has left a still-devastating impact on both marine life and the Gulf economy.This time around, we’ve come to know that oil spills aren’t simply an inevitable risk of necessary human activity. We’re increasingly aware that our dependency on oil remains a residual crutch from the 19th and 20th centuries that, like economic training wheels, we can’t seem to shake off. The BP oil spill not only managed to provoke global outrage over the fact that we still depend on a resource that is potentially replaceable, but it managed to spur something else and ultimately more important: it brought to the forefront our nagging collective global guilt.Luckily, people are resourceful, and if we are to keep using oil as a main source of energy, at least we’re devoting some time and resources to develop innovative technologies and methods to deal with massive spills. That’s where the latest research from The Virginia Institute of Marine Science comes in: the instititue is working under a 1-year, $350,000 contract through the U.S. Department of the Interior to test whether sound waves can be used to determine the size of oil droplets under water. That information could be crucial to determining where to dump chemical dispersants in the wake of a future oil spill.Over 1.84 million gallons of dispersants were actually used in the Gulf after the BP disaster. Dispersants work to break apart droplets of oil, and when applied below sea level, reduce the amount of oil reaching the surface and shoreline. Unfortunately, the effects of releasing large quantities of dispersants below sea level are difficult to monitor, which is where VIMS’s research would come in useful."To maximize biodegradation, dispersants are designed to produce oil droplets that are less than 100 microns across. But there are currently no tools available to monitor droplet size in deep subsea blowouts," said project leader Paul Panetta, an adjunct professor at VIMS, in a release. "Our goal is to develop acoustic techniques for that purpose, giving spill responders a means to gauge the effectiveness of the dispersants and how much they should use."Acoustic monitoring is potentially far more effective than current optical techniques. For one, sound travels further in water, and sonic instruments are often better at withstanding sea level pressure than research cameras.So far the first tests have been promising. Using the salt water Ohmsett test basin facility in Leonardo, New Jersey, which doubles as as the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the team has been able to conduct tests on measuring oil slick dispersal using both optical and acoustic equipment.Panetta is optimistic about the team’s findings, which so far have shown qualitatively superior results in using acoustic measurement of oil dispersant compared to optical measurement. He said their next step is to "take these data and turn them into a measurement method that would tell us exactly what the droplet size is. That would be valuable to the people spraying the dispersants, and valuable to the people modeling the fate of the oil, because during the cleanup of an oil spill, the size of the oil droplets affects everything."As human species, even with the promise of wind and turbine technologies, and the development of hybrid cars, we still seem to be frustratingly far away for totally replacing crude oil as a source of reliable energy. It’s at least somewhat reassuring to know that we’re working towards methods to clean up our messes more effectively when we inevitably screw up.
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