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Page added on August 17, 2014
Spill Some Oil? Magnetize It for Cleanup
A physicist may have dreamed up a new way to clean up oil spills. David Biello reports.
That thought came to physicist Arden Warner while he watched coverage of the spill back in 2010. And it launched some garage tinkering for Warner, who by day works on improving particle accelerators at Fermilab.
He shaved iron bits from a shovel and sprinkled them atop some engine oil. Lo and behold, a refrigerator magnet pulled the blob of oil wherever he wanted. Now he’s got a patent on the concept that he’s refined over the past few years.
The Warner method requires only a relatively small amount of magnetic metal dust. And the iron particles mix better with oil than with water, or with anything else the oil might get on, like bird feathers or plants.
Another plus: once the oil is collected, the filings can be dried off and reused. And iron is more environmentally friendly than the chemicals currently used to disperse oil. So maybe next time there’s an oil spill—and there will be a next time—we can clean up the mess with magnets.
2 Comments on "Spill Some Oil? Magnetize It for Cleanup"
bobinget on Sun, 17th Aug 2014 7:05 pm
In the Arctic, heavy oil sinks. In point of fact even in the GOM, crude oil went out-of-sight fairly quickly.
This ‘magnetic method’ might work on pipeline, loading and unloading and land based choo choo train ‘spills’.
rockman on Sun, 17th Aug 2014 9:34 pm
Bob – Exactly. We already have some fairly efficient methods for pulling oil of the surface. I also wonder what the loss of buoyancy as the result of mixing hundreds of thousands of pounds of METAL dust in with the oil.
Using magnets to move some globs of oil around pan of water isn’t exactly recovering millions of gallons of oil from a dynamic ocean setting.