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SALT LAKE CITY -- The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico amounts to a massive cleanup job. Utah researchers are wrestling with how to clean water polluted with oil, but they describe that task along the Gulf as spectacularly expensive and vast.
![In this May 1, 2010 satellite photo, the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico closes in on the Gulf Coast in the southern U.S. (AP Photo/NASA) [CLICK to enlarge]](https://img.ksl.com/slc/1999/199991/19999162.jpg?filter=kslv2/inline_sm)
It's a dilemma: How to clean water polluted by oil?
Andy Hong is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Utah. In his lab, they zap oily water with microbubbles from pressurized ozone, and then filter it through sand.
Water contaminated with oil -- from things like oil and gas drilling, or tar sands mining -- can be made cleaner. But cleaning miles and miles of seawater is a problem on an entirely larger scale.
"With a problem of this magnitude, it's going to be rather costly every step of the way," Hong says. "From containing it, to treatment, to the aftermath of dealing with it, it could be expensive."
Related:
BP says it will pay for Gulf spill's cleanup
BP PLC gave some assurance Monday to shrimpers, oil workers and scores of others that they will be paid for damage and injuries from the explosion of a drilling rig and the resulting massive oil spill in the Gulf.In a nearby lab, a team of researchers is studying a biological process for cleaning contaminated water, using bacteria to break down the hydrocarbons. Again, this is not easy in the ocean.
"Seawater is constantly in a state of motion so that it continues to spread. So, we're not talking about a confined area here, and that's the challenge -- how we can confine the spreading. That's a big challenge," says Ramesh Goel, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Utah.
With the sheer size of this catastrophe, researchers say Gulf Coast communities are in uncharted territory.
"These problems are not common; and if something is not common, the solution is not common also. And that's the challenge," Goel says.
"It seems to be a huge problem," Hong says. "There may not be a solution in sight in the very near future."
One researcher we spoke with says it's possible some of the Gulf Coast could become like a federal superfund site, where the costs of cleanup are astronomical and span decades.
E-mail: jdaley@ksl.com
