- This oil painting is worth a lot of money
because it's actually a gigantic oil spill.
Hmm, gross, but not to worry, it can still be picked up
and salvaged with a special kind of sponge.
No, not that sponge.
No matter what your take on fossil fuels
or renewable energy is, I think we can all agree
that oil spills are not great, and we need a better way
to clean them up.
Right now, we mainly just set them on fire.
Yeah, we're just burning the ocean.
- It's called an in-situ burn.
You get it so it's thick enough on top of the water
that you can strike a flame,
and it'll actually just burn away.
- But what if you could pull that oil out
and use it?
And what if we all might be sitting on the solution?
- The starting material- I'm actually probably
sitting on right now- it's polyurethane foam.
- It turns out this super common material,
with a few atomic modifications, can clean up oil spills
better than anything else we've got,
which is good because we spill a lot of oil,
a few hundred million gallons every year.
- The big ones happen once in a while
and they make front page news,
but there are actually thousands of oil spills every year,
just in the United States.
- A new wave of material sciences could help us
start cleaning the environment instead of just,
well, using it as a trash can.
This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
Everyone, hold onto your butts.
Hey, it looks like someone was filming
while I was monologuing.
That's me.
So just like the United States has a network
of national parks, it also has a network
of national laboratories, where incredibly advanced research
can be done that isn't quite feasible for industry
to carry out.
The most famous national laboratory,
Hawkins National Laboratory, where they help orphans
find their true talents, apparently isn't even real.
- 'No!'
- I know, I'm disappointed too.
It was probably loosely based on this place,
Argonne National Laboratory, which was built in the woods.
Totally normal.
And has these very not weird buildings that are
definitely not housing gates
to other dimensions or Demogorgons.
- Science builds on itself.
You're always standing on the shoulders of giants,
but a stack of giants.
- This is Seth Darling.
Seth helped create a new, oil-loving sponge
from an everyday material.
- Everybody interacts with polyurethane foam all the time.
It's used in furniture cushions, insulation,
and other things- super cheap, made on a huge scale.
It would be great if you could just take polyurethane foam
and have it soak up oil, but unfortunately,
polyurethane doesn't like oil more than water.
In fact, it likes them almost exactly the same.
- But what if you could change the surface properties
of polyurethane by applying a super thin layer
of some other material,
like four-billionths of an inch thin?
Jeff knows all about that.
- The research that I do is ways to put down
single atomic layers that can make a profound impact
on society.
And in this case, it's the ability to clean oil
from seawater.
The particular technology that we do
this atomic layer deposition, is able to put
single atomic layers on the outside surfaces of materials
and change their functionality.
That's what we did for 'Oleo Sponge.'
- The idea is that if you can lay down
a single layer of atoms or molecules,
you can totally change how an object interacts
with the world around it.
For example, you can make something hydrophobic,
so water rolls right off of it.
Or you can make it oleophilic, so oils cling to it.
- So we start with polyurethane foam,
and then we do a two-step process to it
to change its surface chemistry.
- First, they coat the entire interior surface
of the foam with molecules that have aluminum
or zinc in them.
This makes it easier for another layer of molecules
to be applied on top.
The second step is to apply that layer of molecules
called a 'silane.'
- That one end of the silane molecule binds
very strongly to those metals.
The other end of the silane molecule was chosen to love oil.
- Let's go to the next lab.
- So how do you add these teeny-tiny layers?
Well, in this teeny-tiny reactor.
It's real small, like a pipe. It's a pipe.
- So let's open the reactor.
So now we'll load a bunch of polyurethane foam.
This is very quick, just 10-minute job to coat
one nanometer.
- Inside this pipe, uh, reactor, the temperature
and pressure are controlled with incredible precision
while the chemical vapor is inserted.
- So now when we take that sponge and we put it down
into oil and water, it doesn't grab any water
'cause it's hydrophobic, but it grabs oil voraciously.
That's why we call it oleophilic, oil loving.
- Yeah. - It loves the oil.
- And once you've got an oil-loving sponge,
you can get started cleaning up the world, right?
Well, almost.
- We've had a lot of interest from companies asking us,
"This sounds great, can you send us 50 square meters?"
And we say, "Sorry, we can't do that right now.
We can send you a one-inch cube.
Or if you give us time, we'll send you
a lot of one-inch cubes."
But that's the bottleneck,
is the scale above the manufacturing.
- Sounds like you need a bigger pipe.
- Yeah.
- Remember in "Superman 3", when Superman
literally blew oil right back into a tanker?
Neither do I.
But it might actually not have been the most
unrealistic thing about this movie.
- The mindset with oil spills today is let's just try
and get it out of the environment.
And it's sort of already assumed to be a loss.
Oleo Sponge is a 'hard reset' for oil spill cleanup.
It's a lot more sustainable and makes a lot more sense
than burning the oil which is the dominant technique
that's used today.
- Other ways of cleaning up oil from the ocean
will put that problem somewhere else.
They'll either convert it into CO2 so that it causes
global warming, or they'll end up stuffing a landfill.
- But just like Superman, Oleo Sponge
has the potential to grab all that oil and put it
right back into a tanker.
It just needs to scale up a bit.
- There's a big gap between a one-inch cube
and addressing a spill in the open ocean.
So we've taken some steps towards scaling it up.
There's a big facility in New Jersey called Ohmsett:
it's a gigantic tank, so they can actually spill oil
into seawater, but not in the open ocean, and train people
on how to clean it up.
And it's also used to test new oil-spill technologies
like Oleo Sponge.
- The Oleo Sponge team made 10,000 little cubes
and sewed them together.
And with these, they were able to test this technology
on a large scale.
Most oil-removal technology is limited to the surface,
but Oleo Sponge can be dragged under the water
to clean up below the surface.
- That was actually our main goal in developing Oleo Sponge.
It works great on slicks on the surface,
and we hope it'll be used for that.
But we really wanted to solve this challenge for which
there is no solution today- oil in the water column.
We weren't sure it would work,
but it actually did amazingly well.
It was the first successful demonstration
of pulling oil out of the water column like that.
When they did the chemical analysis,
it worked with different crude oils,
and even with diesel fuel, which also gets spilled
into water a lot- that's a refined oil product.
- The Oleo Sponge pulls oil out of the water,
but it can also be wrung out again and again and again.
The other big difference is that the recovered oil
can actually be used instead of just,
you know, burning it.
- You recover the oil, you reuse the sorbent.
It's just a completely different way
of attacking an oil spill.
- So, picture a scenario where a ship drags a net
of these sponges behind it, wringing out the sponges
and recirculating them as it goes.
A single boat like this could pull tons and tons of oil
out of the ocean.
That oil wouldn't be a waste product,
it would be a usable commodity.
You could sell it, and refine it
into all the wonderful things we typically pollute
our environment with, like plastic and gasoline.
But this isn't just a hard reset for cleaning up oil spills,
it could also have huge implications
for every aspect of how humans use water.
- Using our innovation in material science
and materials chemistry to tackle water challenges
is really a revolution in how we think about water-
which is to close the loop.
Instead of going once through, you take water
out of the environment, you clean it if you need to,
you use it, but now instead of dumping it back
into nature again, you clean it up enough and reuse it.
- If we could clean up our wastewater to the point
where we didn't need to take as much out of the environment
to survive, we wouldn't need to deplete the groundwater
that has taken tens of thousands of years to accumulate,
or take water out of the rivers and lakes
that have replenished those sources.
But first, we need this technology to be widely available.
- We need somebody to take this technology, make the tools
that someone can then buy to manufacture it to sell
to all of these people who are line up down the block
ready to buy it.
- You can't help but think, "Gosh, if only there was
some giant industry with lots of money and power
and a global logistics network that might contribute
to oil spills in some way."
Oh, well, seems unlikely.
But then again, it also seemed unlikely that "Superman 3"
would be an accurate prediction of the future.
Come back next time for another episode of "Hard Reset."
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