Laboratory Investigation into the Evaporation of Natural-Gas Condensate Oils: Hints for the Sanchi Oil Spill

The Sanchi oil tanker collision in the East China Sea on January 6th, 2018 has caused worldwide attention due to its uniqueness. A considerable amount of highly volatile natural-gas condensate oil was spilled, burned and sank with the Sanchi tanker, this entirely new kind of maritime disaster has posed massive unknowns to the public. In this study, for better understanding of the evaporative behavior of condensate oils, two condensate oils were investigated under various laboratory conditions. The overall result demonstrates that the evaporation of condensate oils is highly dependent on the air-exposed time and the total loss of condensate oils could be more than 90% within a short time. However, a certain amount of the high-molecular weight and toxic oil contents such as phenanthrenes still highly remain in the aquatic system even after a long evaporation process, indicating their detrimental potentials to the aquatic organisms. Based on these data, for the Sanchi oil spill accident, it is assumed that although the evaporation weathering of the total condensate oil mass is probably tremendous, the long-term ecological risks of the remaining oil components in the marine environment are strongly recommended to be carefully evaluated.

A CFD Model to Evaluate Near-Surface Oil Spill from a Broken Loading Pipe in Shallow Coastal Waters

Oil spills continue to generate various issues and concerns regarding their effect and behavior in the marine environment,owing to the related potential for detrimental environmental,economic and social implications.It is essential to have a solid understanding of the ways in which oil interacts with the water and the coastal ecosystems that are located nearby.This study proposes a simplified model for predicting the plume-like transport behavior of heavy Bunker C fuel oil discharging downward from an acutely-angled broken pipeline located on the water surface.The results show that the spill overall profile is articulated in three major flow areas.The first,is the source field,i.e.,a region near the origin of the initial jet,followed by the intermediate or transport field,namely,the region where the jet oil flow transitions into an underwater oil plume flow and starts to move horizontally,and finally,the far-field,where the oil re-surface and spreads onto the shore at a significant distance from the spill site.The behavior of the oil in the intermediate field is investigated using a simplified injection-type oil spill model capable of mimicking the undersea trapping and lateral migration of an oil plume originating from a negatively buoyant jet spill.A rectangular domain with proper boundary conditions is used to implement the model.The Projection approach is used to discretize a modified version of the Navier-Stokes equations in two dimensions.A benchmark fluid flow issue is used to verify the model and the results indicate a reasonable relationship between specific gravity and depth as well as agreement with the aerial data and a vertical temperature profile plot.

A review of numerical modeling research on the marine oil spill

Recently, as the oceanic activities are more and more frequently carried out, marine oil spill accidents bring to enormous harm to the economy and society in China, especially in the Offshore China. Marine oil spill is one kind of serious disasters which severely damages the marine environment. Aiming at the improvement of the emergency response system and response ability for the oil spill, the relative technologies on oil spill response are developed. This paper briefly introduces the developments and achievements of the oil spill numerical models, including the oil spill spreading model, the oil spill transport model, the oil particle model as well as the oil spill weathering model, which provide the theoretic criterions for the future work on the oil spill predicting and response.

Bioremediation of Oil Spills in Cold Environments: A Review

Oil spills have become a serious problem in cold environments with the ever-increasing resource exploitation, transportation, storage, and accidental leakage of oil. Several techniques, including physical, chemical, and biological methods, are used to recover spilled oil from the environment. Bioremediation is a promising option for remediation since it is effective and economic in removing oil with less undue environmental damages. However, it is a relatively slow process in cold regions and the degree of success depends on a number of factors, including the properties and fate of oil spilled in cold environments, and the major microbial and environmental limitations of bioremediation. The microbial factors include bioavailability of hydrocarbons, mass transfer through the cell membrane, and metabolic limitations. As for the environmental limitations in the cold regions, the emphasis is on soil temperatures, freeze-thaw processes, oxygen and nutrients availability, toxicity, and electron acceptors. There have been several cases of success in the polar regions, particularly in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. However, the challenges and constraints for bioremediation in cold environments remain large.

The Impact of Diferent Vertical Difusion Schemes in a Three-Dimensional Oil Spill Model in the Bohai Sea

Vertical transport is critical to the movement of oil spills in seawater. Breaking waves play an important role by developing a well-defined mixing layer in the upper part of the water column. A three-dimensional （3-D） Lagrangian random walk oil spill model was used here to study the influence of sea surface waves on the vertical turbulence movement of oil particles. Three vertical diffusion schemes were utilized in the model to compare their impact on oil dispersion and transportation. The first scheme calculated the vertical eddy viscosity semi-empirically. In the second scheme, the vertical diffusion coefficient was obtained directly from an Eulerian hydrodynamic model （Princeton Ocean Model, POM2k） while considering wave- caused turbulence. The third scheme was formulated by solving the Langevin equation. The trajectories, percentages of oil particles intruding into water, and the vertical distribution structures of oil particles were analyzed for a series of numerical experiments with different wind magnitudes. The results showed that the different vertical diffusion schemes could generate different horizontal trajectories and spatial distributions of oil spills on the sea surface. The vertical diffusion schemes caused different water-intruding and resurfacing oil particle behaviors, leading to different horizontal transport of oil particles at the surface and subsurface of the ocean. The vertical diffusion schemes were also applied to a realistic oil spill simulation, and these results were compared to satellite observations. All three schemes yielded acceptable results, and those of the third scheme most closely simulated the observed data.

A study of oil spill detection using ASAR images

The oil spilled worldwide causes ecological disasters that result in enormous damages to the quality of marine environment, and great expenses on clear-up operations are needed. Due to its wide coverage and day-night all-weather observation capability, Synthetic Aperture Radar （SAR） is an important tool for oil spill monitoring and detection. C-band SAR is well adapted to detect oil pollution because oil slicks dampen the Bragg waves and reduce radar backscattering coefficients. In order to detect the area of oil slicks, the algorithm consists of these steps： Preprocessing, Masking of land areas, Detection of dark spots, Spot feature extraction, Dark spot classification. In this paper, the authors examined two coastal regions around Hong Kong and Yantai, China. The obtained results performed on Envisat ASAR images have demonstrated that it is efficient to detect oil spill around the coastal regions. The methodology still needs to be refined with the collection of more SAR data in the near future.

Field Experiments of Multi-Channel Oceanographic Fluorescence Lidar for Oil Spill and Chlorophyll-a Detection

A Multi-channel Oceanographic Fluorescence Lidar(MOFL), with a UV excitation at 355 nm and multiple receiving channels at typical wavelengths of fluorescence from oil spills and chlorophyll-a(Chl-a), has been developed using the Laser- induced Fluorescence(LIF) technique. The sketch of the MOFL system equipped with a compact multi-channel photomultiplier tube(MPMT) is introduced in the paper. The methods of differentiating the oil fluorescence from the background water fluorescence and evaluating the Chl-a concentration are described. Two field experiments were carried out to investigate the field performance of the system, i.e., an experiment in coastal areas for oil pollution detection and an experiment over the Yellow Sea for Chl-a monitoring. In the coastal experiment, several oil samples and other fluorescence substances were used to analyze the fluorescence spectral characteristics for oil identification, and to estimate the thickness of oil films at the water surface. The experiment shows that both the spectral shape of fluorescence induced from surface water and the intensity ratio of two channels(I495/I405) are essential to determine oil-spill occurrence. In the airborne experiment, MOFL was applied to measure relative Chl-a concentrations in the upper layer of the ocean. A comparison of relative Chl-a concentration measurements by MOFL and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer(MODIS) indicates that the two datasets are in good agreement. The results show that the MOFL system is capable of monitoring oil spills and Chl-a in the upper layer of ocean water.

Studies on Marine Oil Spills and Their Ecological Damage

The sources of marine oil spills are mainly from accidents of marine oil tankers or freighters, marine oil-drilling platforms, marine oil pipelines, marine oilfields, terrestrial pollution, oil-bearing atmosphere, and offshore oil production equipment. It is concluded upon analysis that there are two main reasons for marine oil spills: (I) The motive for huge economic benefits of oil industry owners and oil shipping agents far surpasses their sense of ecological risks. (II) Marine ecological safety has not become the main concern of national security. Oil spills are disasters because humans spare no efforts to get economic benefits from oil. The present paper draws another conclusion that marine ecological damage caused by oil spills can be roughly divided into two categories: damage to marine resource value (direct value) and damage to marine ecosystem service value (indirect value). Marine oil spills cause damage to marine biological, fishery, seawater, tourism and mineral resources to various extents, which contributes to the lower quality and value of marine resources.

The error source analysis of oil spill transport modeling: a case study

Numerical modeling is an important tool to study and predict the transport of oil spills. However, the accu- racy of numerical models is not always good enough to provide reliable information for oil spill transport. It is necessary to analyze and identify major error sources for the models. A case study was conducted to analyze error sources of a three-dimensional oil spill model that was used operationally for oil spill forecast- ing in the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center （NMEFC）, the State Oceanic Administration, China. On June 4, 2011, oil from sea bed spilled into seawater in Penglai 19-3 region, the largest offshore oil field of China, and polluted an area of thousands of square kilometers in the Bohai Sea. Satellite remote sensing images were collected to locate oil slicks. By performing a series of model sensitivity experiments with different wind and current forcings and comparing the model results with the satellite images, it was identified that the major errors of the long-term simulation for oil spill transport were from the wind fields, and the wind-induced surface currents. An inverse model was developed to estimate the temporal variabil- ity of emission intensity at the oil spill source, which revealed the importance of the accuracy in oil spill source emission time function.

Micro- and nanoporous materials capable of absorbing solvents and oils reversibly： the state of the art

Treatment of petroleum spills and organic solvent pollution in general is an important issue; several techniques are under development to remove oil from water. The use of absorbents is one of the most common techniques to tackle this problem. These absorbents can be classified based on their characteristics of recyclability into irreversible and reversible ones. In this review, we discuss the application of several materials as oil absorbents, according to their classification and characteristics such as hydrophobicity, surface area and oil absorption capacity. Also, the fabrication methods for some materials are presented and analyzed.

Hydrocarbon-Degrading Bacteria and Paraffin from Polluted Seashores 9 Years after the Nakhodka Oil Spill in the Sea of Japan

Pollution of petroleum hydrocarbons, in particular oil spills, has attracted much attention in the past and recent decades. Oil spills influence natural microbial community, and physical and chemical properties of the affected sites. The biodegradation of hydrocarbons by microorganisms is one of the primary ways by which oil spill is eliminated from contaminated sites. One such spill was that of the Russian tanker the Nakhodka that spilled heavy oil into the Sea of Japan on January 2, 1997. The impact of the Nakhodka oil spill resulted in a viscous sticky fluid fouling the shores and affected natural ecosystems. This paper describes the weathering of hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria （genus Pseudomonas） and crystallized organic compounds from the Nakhodka oil spill-polluted seashores after nine years. The Nakhodka oil has hardened and formed crust of crystalline paraffin wax as shown by XRD analysis （0.422, 0.377, and 0.250 nm d-spacing） in association with graphite and calcite after 9 years of bioremediation. Anaerobic reverse side of the oil crust contained numerous coccus typed bacteria associated with halite. The finding of hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria and paraffin wax in the oil crust may have a significant effect on the weathering processes of the Nakhodka oil spill during the 9- year bioremediation.

Oil spill detection by a support vector machine based on polarization decomposition characteristics

Marine oil spills have caused major threats to marine environment over the past few years.The early detection of the oil spill is of great significance for the prevention and control of marine disasters.At present,remote sensing is one of the major approaches for monitoring the oil spill.Full polarization synthetic aperture radarc SAR data are employed to extract polarization decomposition parameters including entropy（H） and reflection entropy（A）.The characteristic spectrum of the entropy and reflection entropy combination has analyzed and the polarization characteristic spectrum of the oil spill has developed to support remote sensing of the oil spill.The findings show that the information extracted from（1-A）×（1-H） and（1-H）×A parameters is relatively evident effects.The results of extraction of the oil spill information based on H×A parameter are relatively not good.The combination of the two has something to do with H and A values.In general,when H〉0.7,A value is relatively small.Here,the extraction of the oil spill information using（1-A）×（1-H） and（1-H）×A parameters obtains evident effects.Whichever combined parameter is adopted,oil well data would cause certain false alarm to the extraction of the oil spill information.In particular the false alarm of the extracted oil spill information based on（1-A）×（1-H） is relatively high,while the false alarm based on（1-A）×H and（1-H）×A parameters is relatively small,but an image noise is relatively big.The oil spill detection employing polarization characteristic spectrum support vector machine can effectively identify the oil spill information with more accuracy than that of the detection method based on single polarization feature.

Detection of oil spill based on CBF-CNN using HY-1C CZI multispectral images

Accurate detection of an oil spill is of great significance for rapid response to oil spill accidents.Multispectral images have the advantages of high spatial resolution,short revisit period,and wide imaging width,which is suitable for large-scale oil spill monitoring.However,in wide remote sensing images,the number of oil spill samples is generally far less than that of seawater samples.Moreover,the sea surface state tends to be heterogeneous over a large area,which makes the identification of oil spills more difficult because of various sea conditions and sunglint.To address this problem,we used the F-Score as a measure of the distance between forecast value and true value,proposed the Class-Balanced F loss function(CBF loss function)that comprehensively considers the precision and recall,and rebalances the loss according to the actual sample numbers of various classes.Using the CBF loss function,we constructed convolution neural networks(CBF-CNN)for oil spill detection.Based on the image acquired by the Coastal Zone Imager(CZI)of the Haiyang-1C(HY-1C)satellite in the Andaman Sea(study area 1),we carried out parameter adjustment experiments.In contrast to experiments of different loss functions,the F1-Score of the detection result of oil emulsions is 0.87,which is 0.03–0.07 higher than cross-entropy,hinge,and focal loss functions,and the F1-Score of the detection result of oil slicks is 0.94,which is 0.01–0.09 higher than those three loss functions.In comparison with the experiment of different methods,the F1-Score of CBF-CNN for the detection result of oil emulsions is 0.05–0.12 higher than that of the deep neural networks,supports vector machine and random forests models,and the F1-Score of the detection result of oil slicks is 0.15–0.22 higher than that of the three methods.To verify the applicability of the CBF-CNN model in different observation scenes,we used the image obtained by HY-1C CZI in the Karimata Strait to carry out experiments,which include two studies areas(study area 2 and study area 3).The experimental results show that the F1-Score of CBF-CNN for the detection result of oil emulsions is 0.88,which is 0.16–0.24 higher than that of other methods,and the F1-Score of the detection result of oil slicks is 0.96–0.97,which is 0.06–0.23 higher than that of other methods.Based on all the above experiments,we come to the conclusions that the CBF loss function can restrain the influence of oil spill and seawater sample imbalance on oil spill detection of CNN model thus improving the detection accuracy of oil spills,and our CBF-CNN model is suitable for the detection of oil spills in an area with weak sunglint and can be applied to different scenarios of CZI images.

Research on the risk-based model for regional emergency resource allocation for ship-source oil spill

The key point for rational allocation of emergency resources is to match the oil spill response capacity with the risk of oil spill. This paper proposes an innovative risk-based model for quantitative regional emergency resource allocation, which comprehensively analyzes the factors such as oil spill probability, hazard consequences, oil properties, weathering process and operation efficiency, etc. The model calculates three major resources, i.e., mechanical recovery, dispersion and absorption, according to the results of risk assessment. In a field application in Xiaohu Port, Guangzhou, China, and the model achieved scientific and rational allocation of emergency resources by matching the assessed risk with the regional capacity, and allocating emergency resources according to capability target. The model is considered to be beneficial to enhancing the resource efficiency and may contribute to the planning of capacity-building programs in high-risk areas.

The influence of Stokes drift on oil spills:Sanchi oil spill case

Spilled oil floats and travels across the water’s surface under the influence of wind,currents,and wave action.Wave-induced Stokes drift is an important physical process that can affect surface water particles but that is currently absent from oil spill analyses.In this study,two methods are applied to determine the velocity of Stokes drift,the first calculates velocity from the wind-related formula based upon a one-dimensional frequency spectrum,while the second determines velocity directly from the wave model that was based on a twodimensional spectrum.The experimental results of numerous models indicated that:(1)oil simulations that include the influence of Stokes drift are more accurate than that those do not;(2)for medium and long-term simulations longer than two days or more,Stokes drift is a significant factor that should not be ignored,and its magnitude can reach about 2%of the wind speed;(3)the velocity of Stokes drift is related to the wind but is not linear.Therefore,Stokes drift cannot simply be replaced or substituted by simply increasing the wind drift factor,which can cause errors in oil spill projections;(4)the Stokes drift velocity obtained from the two-dimensional wave spectrum makes the oil spill simulation more accurate.

Application of computational fluid dynamics simulation for submarine oil spill

Computational fluid dynamics （CFD） codes are being increasingly used in the simulation of submarine oil spills. This study focuses on the process of oil spills, from damaged submarine pipes, to the sea surface, using numerical models. The underwater oil spill model is developed, and a description of the governing equations is proposed, along with modifications required for the particalization of the control volume. Available experimental data were introduced to evaluate the validity of the CFD predictions, the results of which proved to be in good agreement with the experimental data. The effects of oil leak rate, leak diameter, current velocity, and oil density are investigated, by the validated CFD model, to estimate the undersea leakage time, the lateral migration distance, and surface diffusion range when the oil reaches the sea surface. Results indicate that the leakage time and lateral migration distance increase with decreasing leak rates and leak diameter, and increase with increasing current velocity and oil density. On the other hand, a large leak diameter, high density, high leak rate, or fast currents result in a greater surface diffusion range. The findings and analysis presented here will provide practical predictions of oil spills, and guidance for emergency rescues.

A fast,edge-preserving,distance-regularized model with bilateral filtering for oil spill segmentation of SAR images

Marine oil spills are among the most significant sources of marine pollution.Synthetic aperture radar(SAR)has been used to improve oil spill observations because of its advantages in oil spill detection and identification.However,speckle noise,weak boundaries,and intensity inhomogeneity often exist in the oil spill regions of SAR imagery,which will seriously aff ect the accurate identification of oil spills.To enhance marine oil spill segmentation of SAR images,a fast,edge-preserving framework based on the distance-regularized level set evolution(DRLSE)model was proposed.Specifically,a bilateral filter penalty term is designed and incorporated into the DRLSE energy function(BF-DRLSE)to preserve the edges of oil spills,and an adaptive initial box boundary was selected for the DRLSE model to reduce the operation time complexity.Two sets of RadarSat-2 SAR data were used to test the proposed method.The experimental results indicate that the bilateral filtering scheme incorporated into the energy function during level set evolution improved the stability of level set evolution.Compared with other methods,the proposed improved BF-DRLSE algorithm displayed a higher overall segmentation accuracy(97.83%).In addition,using an appropriate initial box boundary for the DRLSE method accelerated the global search process,improved the accuracy of oil spill segmentation,and reduced computational time.Therefore,the results suggest that the proposed framework is eff ective and applicable for marine oil spill segmentation.

The polarimetric features of oil spills in full polarimetric synthetic aperture radar images

Compared with single-polarized synthetic aperture radar （SAR） images, full polarimetric SAIl images contain not only geometrical and backward scattering characteristics, but also the polarization features of the scattering targets. Therefore, the polarimetric SAR has more advantages for oil spill detection on the sea surface. As a crucial step in the oil spill detection, a feature extraction directly influences the accuracy of oil spill discrimination. The polarimetric features of sea oil spills, such as polarimetric entropy, average scatter angle, in the full polarimetric SAR images are analyzed firstly. And a new polarimetric parameter P which reflects the proportion between Bragg and specular scattering signals is proposed. In order to investigate the capability of the polarimetric features for observing an oil spill, systematic comparisons and analyses of the multipolarization features are provided on the basis of the full polarimetric SAR images acquired by SIR-C/X-SAR and Radarsat-2. The experiment results show that in C-band SAR images the oil spills can be detected more easily than in L-band SAR images under low to moderate wind speed conditions. Moreover, it also finds that the new polarimetric parameter is sensitive to the sea surface scattering mechanisms. And the experiment results demonstrate that the new polarimetric parameter and pedestal height perform better than other polarimetric parameters for the oil spill detection in the C-band SAR images.

Abundance quantification by independent component analysis of hyperspectral imagery for oil spill coverage calculation

The estimation of oil spill coverage is an important part of monitoring of oil spills at sea.The spatial resolution of images collected by airborne hyper-spectral remote sensing limits both the detection of oil spills and the accuracy of estimates of their size.We consider at-sea oil spills with zonal distribution in this paper and improve the traditional independent component analysis algorithm.For each independent component we added two constraint conditions:non-negativity and constant sum.We use priority weighting by higher-order statistics,and then the spectral angle match method to overcome the order nondeterminacy.By these steps,endmembers can be extracted and abundance quantified simultaneously.To examine the coverage of a real oil spill and correct our estimate,a simulation experiment and a real experiment were designed using the algorithm described above.The result indicated that,for the simulation data,the abundance estimation error is 2.52% and minimum root mean square error of the reconstructed image is 0.030 6.We estimated the oil spill rate and area based on eight hyper-spectral remote sensing images collected by an airborne survey of Shandong Changdao in 2011.The total oil spill area was 0.224 km^2,and the oil spill rate was 22.89%.The method we demonstrate in this paper can be used for the automatic monitoring of oil spill coverage rates.It also allows the accurate estimation of the oil spill area.

A hindcast of the Bohai Bay oil spill during June to August 2011

An operational three-dimensional oil spill model is developed by the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center（NMEFC）, State Oceanic Administration, China, and the model has been running for 9 a. On June 4 and 17,2011, oil is spilled into the sea water from two separate oil platforms in the Bohai Bay, i.e., Platforms B and C of Penglai 19-3 oilfield. The spill causes pollution of thousands of square kilometres of sea area. The NMEFC’s oil spill model is employed to study the Penglai 19-3 oil-spill pollution during June to August 2011. The wind final analysis data of the NMEFC, which is based on a weather research and forecasting（WRF） model, are analyzed and corrected by comparing with the observation data. A corrected current filed is obtained by forcing the princeton ocean model（POM） with the corrected wind field. With the above marine environmental field forcing the oil spill model, the oil mass balance and oil distribution can be produced. The simulation is validated against the observation, and it is concluded that the oil spill model of the NMEFC is able to commendably simulate the oil spill distribution. Thus the NMEFC’s oil spill model can provide a tool in an environmental impact assessment after the event.