Surfactant leaching is a method of water and
soil decontamination
Soil contamination, soil pollution, or land pollution as a part of land degradation is caused by the presence of xenobiotic (human-made) chemicals or other alteration in the natural soil environment. It is typically caused by industrial activity ...
,
[''Environmental Biotechnology: Principles and Applications'']
p. 272
/ref>[Knudsen O. Ø., P.J. Brandvik, A. Lewis, "Treating oil spills with W/O emulsion inhibitors: A laboratory study of surfactant leaching from the oil to the water phase", in: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Arctic and Marine Oilspill Program Technical Seminar, 1994, pp. 1023-1034 ] e.g., for oil recovery in petroleum industry
The petroleum industry, also known as the oil industry or the oil patch, includes the global processes of hydrocarbon exploration, exploration, extraction of petroleum, extraction, oil refinery, refining, Petroleum transport, transportation (of ...
.[''Hydrocarbon Contaminated Soils'', Volume 3]
pp. 15,16
/ref>[ It involves mixing of contaminated water or soil with ]surfactant
Surfactants are chemical compounds that decrease the surface tension between two liquids, between a gas and a liquid, or interfacial tension between a liquid and a solid. Surfactants may act as detergents, wetting agents, emulsifiers, fo ...
s with the subsequent leaching
Leaching is the loss or extraction of certain materials from a carrier into a liquid (usually, but not always a solvent). and may refer to:
*Leaching (agriculture), the loss of water-soluble plant nutrients from the soil; or applying a small amoun ...
of emulsified
An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (unmixable or unblendable) owing to liquid-liquid phase separation. Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids. Although ...
contaminants.[ In oil recovery, most common surfactant types are ethoxylated alcohols, ethoxylated nonylphenols, ]sulphate
The sulfate or sulphate ion is a polyatomic ion, polyatomic anion with the empirical formula . Salts, acid derivatives, and peroxides of sulfate are widely used in industry. Sulfates occur widely in everyday life. Sulfates are salt (chemistry), ...
s, sulphonate
In organosulfur chemistry, a sulfonate is a salt or ester of a sulfonic acid. It contains the functional group , where R is an organic group. Sulfonates are the conjugate bases of sulfonic acids. Sulfonates are generally stable in water, non-o ...
s, and biosurfactants.[
]
References
{{reflist
Soil contamination
Solid-solid separation
Oil spill remediation technologies