NASA To Test Innovative Bioremediation Technique for Oil Spills

An Alabama hair dresser's flash of inspiration, supported by tests by NASA, may hold the key to future oil spill clean-ups.

Under terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., is collaborating with BEPS, Inc., of Madison, Ala., to test a novel technique for the recovery of oil spilled in water.

BEPS President Phillip McCrory said, "My inspiration came in 1989 when I was watching CNN's coverage of the huge oil spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. I saw an otter being rescued and noticed that its fur was saturated with oil.

"This gave me an idea," he continued. "If fur can trap and hold spilled oil, why shouldn't human hair work equally as well?" The hair dresser collected five pounds of hair he'd cut in the salon in which he worked and stuffed it into a pair of his wife's pantyhose, then tied the ankles together to form a ring. "For a test tank," he said, "I filled my son's wading pool with water, put the hair-filled ring of hosiery into the center, and poured some used motor oil into the middle. Oil floats on water, so when I pulled the legs of the hosiery ring together, the oil was adsorbed onto the hair inside of it. I couldn't see a trace of oil in the water. When the hosiery was wrung out, most of the oil was recovered. The remainder was broken down and disposed of when the hosiery was washed with a detergent."

McCrory said one of his biggest hurdles was determining that no one had thought of this solution before him.

"I've received two patents for inventing various hair styling devices and know how expensive it can be to file for a patent," he said. "Before I was willing to invest that much money in my idea, I needed to do some investigating of similar patent applications. I found one which involved using sheep's wool. As wool is already in demand for textiles and clothing, and unprocessed wool has an oily substance, lanolin, in it, the process was not very efficient, McCrory said, adding that raw wool also can contain parasites. Duck feathers also had been tried, he said, but here again, the product was a commodity already in demand for use in insulating clothing and stuffing pillows. Duck feathers also are naturally oily, as this helps insulate the birds in cold water and enables them to stay afloat.

"I also discovered that human hair adsorbs – rather than absorbs – oil. Instead of bonding with the hair, the oil just gathers in layers on the hair's surface. It can be easily recovered for reuse simply by squeezing it from the collection bundles," he said.

"When I concluded my research, I realized that I'd found a commercial use for what was, at present, a waste product. Thousands of tons of human hair are cut every day and tossed into landfills or dumped into the ocean. Hair does not degrade well – some samples have been found which are thousands of years old. Using it for the bioremediation of oil spills would put it to work while simultaneously reducing the amount of waste material going into landfills – a real win-win situation. As a final resort," he said, "the oil-saturated bundles can be burned as fuel and the energy value of the petroleum they contain can be recovered."

Living near the Marshall Center, a major research and development facility of the U.S. space agency, McCrory approached the center's Technology Transfer Office with a request to formally test his idea under controlled laboratory conditions. The center's environmental control office supported the request for Marshall to perform the tests as the system would be of use to NASA and other federal agencies to contain oil spills on their grounds.

The results of preliminary field tests also encouraged NASA in making its decision to participate in the tests. In one test, a 55-gallon oil drum was filled with about 40 gallons water and 15 gallons of oil. The mixture was then filtered through nylon bags filled with hair. When the water was tested after just a single pass through the innovative filter, only 17 parts of oil per million parts of water remained.

McCrory estimated that 25,000 pounds of hair in nylon collection bags may be sufficient to adsorb 170,000 gallons of spilled oil. Preliminary tests have shown that a gallon of oil can be adsorbed in less than two minutes with McCrory's method. There's also a potential cost savings in McCrory's method. Present methods cost approximately $10 to recover a gallon of oil. McCrory's system may cost as little as $2 per gallon, and offers the additional benefit of being able to use the recovered oil for fuel.