• 3 minutes e-car sales collapse
  • 6 minutes America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide
  • 11 minutes Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient
  • 4 hours GREEN NEW DEAL = BLIZZARD OF LIES
  • 7 hours How Far Have We Really Gotten With Alternative Energy
  • 8 hours If hydrogen is the answer, you're asking the wrong question
  • 4 days Oil Stocks, Market Direction, Bitcoin, Minerals, Gold, Silver - Technical Trading <--- Chris Vermeulen & Gareth Soloway weigh in
  • 6 days The European Union is exceptional in its political divide. Examples are apparent in Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, Netherlands, Belarus, Ireland, etc.
  • 21 hours Biden's $2 trillion Plan for Insfrastructure and Jobs
  • 4 days "What’s In Store For Europe In 2023?" By the CIA (aka RFE/RL as a ruse to deceive readers)

Smart Sponge Holds the Key to Cleaning Fracking Water

At the recent World Shale Oil & Gas Summit, Abtech Holdings Glenn Rink was handed the award for the best technology innovator of 2012. Their amazing technology? A sponge.

Fracking is massively water intensive and one of the main problems is cleaning the contaminated water after it has been used. Each well requires millions of gallons of water mixed with chemicals in order to break open the shale and allow the oil and gas to flow. When the water returns to the surface it is highly polluted with chemicals, petroleum liquids, metals, and other debris.

Current technologies use skimmers, centrifuges, and reverse osmosis to clean the water, yet they are not perfect, and the water still remains too polluted to be used in the fracking process again, or to be released back into the water table.

Abtech’s ‘Smart Sponge’ seems to hold the solution. The sponge is made in a process which makes the plastic structure highly oleophilic yet hydrophobic. This means that the sponge does not soak up any water at all, yet absorbs as much oil as possible. In fact it is so oleophilic that it can soak up three pounds of oil for every pound of sponge, and in such a way that the hydrocarbon molecules chemically bond with the sponge and are not released.

RELATED: Big Oil Funding U.S. Politics

The fact that every pound of Smart Sponge will hold three pounds of oil means that the used sponges become solid sources of fuel. Abtech is now in the process of developing generators which will use these oil saturated sponges as fuel, rather than the traditional diesel.

By. Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com



Join the discussion | Back to homepage



Leave a comment
  • Hans Nieder on September 24 2012 said:
    Very interesting read, Mr Kennedy...
    I wish the company great success with this product...

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4081775891246754549

Leave a comment

EXXON Mobil -0.35
Open57.81 Trading Vol.6.96M Previous Vol.241.7B
BUY 57.15
Sell 57.00
Oilprice - The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News