Feasibility of Deep Nutrients Delivery into a Prince William Sound Beach for the Bioremediation of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Abstract

Delivery of dissolved chemicals to potentially bioremediate oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill was investigated at Smith Island, Prince William Sound, Alaska. Two transects for tracer application were installed: one at a clean area and another at an oiled area. Tracer delivery occurred under ambient pressure through manifolds. Lithium in LiBr/sea water solution was the inert tracer, and the solution (82.6 mg/L of lithium) was released at a flow rate of 0.23 L/min for 58.5 h. While maintaining the flow rate, the solution was switched to sea water (i.e., 0.0 mg/L of lithium) for 16 h. The results show that the tracer moved landward with rising tides and seaward with falling tides. The plume got deeper moving landward and shallower moving seaward of the manifold. Thus, in situations where oil biodegradation is limited by the availability of nutrients or oxygen, applying these chemicals by this technique would allow them to reach entrapped oil seaward of the manifold from below. The seaward plume traveling speed (around 2.0 m/d) suggests that this technique is logistically feasible from a hydraulic point of view.

The influence of evaporation and rainfall on supratidal groundwater dynamics and salinity structure in a sandy beach

“…The groundwater table was monitored from 3 through 28 January 2011. The approach followed our previous work for different beaches for various research purposes, including oil spill investigation [Boufadel et al, 2011;Geng et al, 2013Geng et al, , 2015Li and Boufadel, 2010].…”

Application of lightweight expanded clay aggregate as sorbent for crude oil cleanup

“…Whether in storage or in transport, oils are at times spilled onto land or within water bodies, which happens to be a growing issue worldwide. Disasters, such as the Deep Water Horizon oil spill and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, serve as evidences that coastal oil spills present risk to the economy and natural resources, and could directly influence public's health [3]. In 1989, in Exxon Valdez in Alaska on the coastal reef of the Prince William Sound (PWS), an enormous amount of 11 million gallons of crude oil -nearly 260 thousand barrels of crude oil, spilled into the ocean, one mile off the shore [4].…”

Numerical study of solute transport in shallow beach aquifers subjected to waves and tides

“…The impact of tides on solute transport in nearshore aquifers has been thoroughly investigated in the last two decades by experiments [ Wrenn et al ., ; Uchiyama et al ., ; Boufadel et al ., ] and through numerical simulations [ Boufadel et al ., ; Brovelli et al ., ; Robinson et al ., ; Xia et al ., ].…”