Scientists discover new way to study oil spills

Douglass Gavilan/Staff Writer

Scientists at FIU have created a new tool that will help find new ways to look at oil in the event of a spill.

Headed by director Francisco Fernandez-Lima and his team from the Center for Aquatic Chemistry and Environment, the team conducted their experiments in the Academic Health Center building. The study also features members from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The tool created gives a more detailed reading of an oil sample and is meant to look at crude oil which is a type of unrefined petroleum usually found when oil drilling. According to the U.S. Energy information administration, oil is then used for multiple reasons including powering cars and heating up generators. Despite this, there is little known about its chemical make-up. It’s also difficult to see how the oil reacts to such things as sunlight or the ocean. Now with the new invention, scientists are able to see how oil acts from the molecular level.

“Previously, we could only read the mass of an oil sample,” said Paolo Benigni, lead author of the study. “Now we are able to look at separate molecules by their size and shape.”

The team was funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. The tool is now on sale for other scientists. Scientists in the future, Fernandez-Lima predicts, will have an easier time when it comes to oil spills. It could become possible to determine how far oil can travel and how long it stays in the environment.

“The idea is that no one knows what’s in crude oil to begin with,” said Benigni. “Then when it’s mixed with water a lot of things could happen. So we found out that light helps oil somewhat dissolves into water. The only thing we need to know are the molecules and what they are.”

The tool was developed in collaboration between Fernandez-Lima and Bruker Daltonics INC., a manufacturer company known for their scientific instruments centered around molecular and materials research, and took around six years to create. The study revolves around the results of trapped ion mobility spectrometry when it’s coupled with ultrahigh resolution mass analyzers.

“We can now tell what crude oil and what steps it’s going through,” Fernandez-Lima said. “Crude oil is one of the most complex samples out there. It has somewhere around 400 compounds. So we really need to use this technology to separate into single molecules and to quantify and follows the dynamix.”

With this discovery, Fernandez-Lima and Benigni hopes researchers could start using the tool and begin using it on more than just oil spills. Scientists can also use the study to look into other moments of contamination happening in other diverse water and land environments such as Biscayne Bay, they said.

The study goes in hand with the recently launched FIU CREST center located at the BBC. It was funded by a $5 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation’s Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology program. The center is part of FIU’s Institute of Water and Environment which is dedicated to addressing global water and environmental issues.

All of Fernandez-Lima and Benigni’s findings can be found in the Environmental Science & Technology section at pubs.acs.org.Preliminary findings were published in the Analytical Chemistry section.