Oil Spills, by Catie and Izzy

October 13, 2020

Yesterday Congress passed a bill outlawing drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge due to the Prudhoe Bay Oil Spill earlier this year on February 15, 2020. We are out of places to drill for oil, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has now outlawed petroleum companies from continuing business in Alaska after the oil spill.

After the iceberg hit the Prudhoe Bay Oil rigs, it was the biggest spill in history. 705 million gallons of oil was spilled. We paid with the damage of our environment, and the loss of wildlife. As many as 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 900 bald eagles, and 250,000 seabirds died in the days following the disaster. Environmentalist Woodrow Atherton of the Sierra Club stated that, "It will take at least seventy years for the local cod population to rebound."

There are solutions to these problems, though. We have new oil spill cleanup technology. A pair of materials researchers, Gloria Watkins and Mahala Swanson, from Pennsylvania State University have come up with a novel gel that can absorb 40 times its own weight in oil and forms a soft solid that is strong enough to be scooped up and fed straight into a refinery to recover the oil. The researchers suggest we can also switch to new power sources in general like wind power or solar.