Category Archives: Marine Pollution Control

This category is exclusively devoted to posts relating to marine pollution control.

Marine Pollution Control

How to Minimize the Marine Pollution Effects on Nigerian Coastal Areas

oil spills
Coastal resources in Nigeria are extensively affected by marine pollution. For example, the fauna, flora and the whole ecology of the coastal environment are grossly impacted by marine pollution. Apart from directly impacting the living resources, in most cases, marine pollutants have the tendency to progressively degrade or negatively alter the environment and subject it to extreme conditions that are way beyond the adaptation or tolerant limits of the living things therein. Aquatic life is also destroyed, owing to acute thermal shocks. Other effects of thermal pollution are normal physiological processes like reproduction and growth of aquatic species that have become grievously impaired. Frequent discharge of oil spills, untreated sewage, hot effluents and other types of debris into coastal aquatic environment is a common phenomenon off the coasts of the industrialized cities of the Niger delta, such as Port Harcourt and Warri, and the Nigeria’s economic capital, Lagos.

Fish Dying of Oil Spill

Moreover, in the coastal environment of Nigeria, gas flaring particularly at flare pits, cause severe thermal pollution. There are numerous flare pits in the Niger delta alone. Scorching heat that emanate from flare sites damage wildlife over a considerable radius of the involved areas. Heat that is emitted via constant burning of forest immensely distorts the natural population density of nocturnal animals.

Dead Bird

Primefield Limited, as a seasoned environmental consultant with so many years of experience, recommends the following measures to the Nigeria’s Federal and State Governments, as well as related agencies and environmental protection bodies:

  • We advise concerned parties to economically empower residents of coastal communities, in order to help make them more responsible on the consequences of environmental waste.
  • Primefield recommends aggressive advocacy and enlightenment of both the pollutants and the affected people.
  • Introduction and setting up of local scientific committees that will transparently collaborate with international partners, to solve localized issues in the affected coastal areas
  • Educating coastal dwellers through re-orientation and attitudinal change on the best ways to reduce, if not eradicate, pollution of our rivers and seas.
  • Educating coastal dwellers on how best to treat sewage before discharging it into the ocean. They should be enlightened on the consequences of discharging untreated sewage into our ocean.
  • Governments should strictly enforce relevant laws that concern the abuse of our seas. Every incident of oil spill should be vigorously investigated and accountability should be put in place at all times. Any company that causes oil spill must be held accountable, and it must clean up the mess quickly and be penalized financially. Apart from oil spill, people who dump waste in the ocean and rivers should be deterred by the consequences of strict penalties.

If you find this article interesting and would like to get more information and insight on how to protect marine life against pollution, don’t hesitate to contact Primefield, your one-stop-shop to environmental Protection consultancy.

Marine Pollution Control

Scientists Turn Oily Soil Into Fertile Ground

Scientists have discovered how you can turn oily soil into fertile ground. The picture below shows their incredible findings of environmental pollution control:

soil remediation

Scientists are cleaning soil contaminated by oil spills in a way that saves energy and reclaims the soil’s fertility, using a process known as pyrolysis, which involves heating contaminated soils in the absence of oxygen. They use a process known as pyrolysis, which involves heating contaminated soils in the absence of oxygen. This approach is much better for the environment than standard incineration techniques for fast mymedic.es remediation, said Rice environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez.

“Our original goal was to speed the response to oil spills, but our aspiration was to turn contaminated soil into fertile soil,” said Alvarez, the George R. Brown Professor and chair of Rice’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

The new paper by Alvarez and his Rice colleagues in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology demonstrates how they’ve done just that.

Off-shore oil spills tend to get the most attention, Alvarez said, but 98 percent of spills — more than 25,000 per year — occur on land. Industry and governments worldwide spend more than $10 billion annually to clean up oil spills.

The Rice team found that pyrolyzing contaminated soil for three hours not only reduced the amount of petroleum hydrocarbons left to well below regulatory standards (typically less than 0.1 percent by weight), but also enhanced the soil’s fertility by turning the remaining carbon into beneficial char.

“We initially thought we could turn the hydrocarbons into biochar,” Alvarez said. “We turned out to be partly wrong: We didn’t get biochar, but [we got] a carbonaceous material that we call char and resembles coke.

“But we were correct in thinking that by removing toxic pollutants and the hydrophobicity that repels water that plants need, and by retaining some of the carbon and perhaps some of the nutrients, we would enhance plant growth,” he said.

The researchers proved that by successfully growing lettuce in reclaimed soil in the lab. “There’s no one plant officially accepted as the standard for testing petroleum toxicity, but lettuce has been accepted by the community as very sensitive to toxins, especially petroleum,” said Rice graduate student Julia Vidonish, the paper’s lead author. “Reclaimed soil may not necessarily be used to grow food, but it certainly could be used for re-greening: planting grass to minimize erosion and to restore vegetation,” Alvarez said.

“Our process is part thermal desorption, but it takes advantage of petroleum chemistry,” said Rice chemical engineer and co-author Kyriacos Zygourakis. “By heating the contaminated soils to about 420 degrees Celsius in the absence of oxygen, we first drive out the lighter hydrocarbons. That’s the desorption part. But when the temperature gets above 350 degrees, the high-molecular-weight hydrocarbons, the resins and asphaltenes, undergo a series of cracking and condensation reactions to form solid char, similar to the petroleum coke produced in refineries.

“We leave some of the hydrocarbons in the treated soil but in a solid, more benign form,” he said. “The Environmental Protection Agency does not classify petroleum coke as hazardous waste. If, on the other hand, you want to remove everything, you have to raise the temperature even higher and introduce oxygen to incinerate the char. But you destroy the soil and use 40 to 60 percent more energy.”

The char produced by pyrolyzing oil-soaked soil is different from biochar, Rice biogeochemist and co-author Caroline Masiello said. Where biochar is a particle unto itself, the coke-like char appears to coat existing soil particles.

“Biochar is a particle that is separate from the soil’s mineral grains,” she said. “It has an internal physical structure that allows it to hold water and nutrients and provides a home for microbes, but here, we’re not making any of those things. We’re making an organic film that coats the minerals.”

Vidonish said the process is scalable and should work with existing remediation equipment. “Incineration and thermal desorption are established technologies, and while this is different, there are similarities,” she said. “We expect companies can take a mobile, field-scale thermal desorption unit and make a couple of modifications to do pyrolysis.”

“We proved we can remove all the bad actors and all the contaminants and at the same time have a final product with agricultural value,” Zygourakis said. “We don’t just turn it into desert sand.”

Much work remains to optimize the process, Vidonish said. “Moving forward, we want to understand how the pyrolysis time and the temperature affect the quality of the char in the soil,” she said.

Journal Reference:

  1. Julia E. Vidonish, Kyriacos Zygourakis, Caroline A. Masiello, Xiaodong Gao, Jacques Mathieu, Pedro J. J. Alvarez.Pyrolytic Treatment and Fertility Enhancement of Soils Contaminated with Heavy Hydrocarbons. Environmental Science & Technology, 2015