Fate of dispersants associated with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Date
2011-01-05Author
Kujawinski, Elizabeth B.
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Kido Soule, Melissa C.
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Valentine, David L.
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Boysen, Angela K.
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Longnecker, Krista
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Redmond, Molly C.
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Metadata
Show full item recordCitable URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1912/4332As published
https://doi.org/10.1021/es103838pKeyword
Deepwater Horizon; Dispersants; DOSS; Dilution; Deepwater plumeAbstract
Response actions to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill included the injection of ~771,000 gallons
(2,900,000 L) of chemical dispersant into the flow of oil near the seafloor. Prior to this incident,
no deepwater applications of dispersant had been conducted and thus no data exists on the
environmental fate of dispersants in deepwater. We used ultrahigh resolution mass
spectrometry and liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) to
identify and quantify one key ingredient of the dispersant, the anionic surfactant DOSS (dioctyl
sodium sulfosuccinate), in the Gulf of Mexico deepwater during active flow and again after
flow had ceased. Here we show that DOSS was sequestered in deepwater hydrocarbon plumes
at 1000-1200m water depth and did not intermingle with surface dispersant applications.
Further, its concentration distribution was consistent with conservative transport and dilution
at depth and it persisted up to 300 km from the well, 64 days after deepwater dispersant
applications ceased. We conclude that DOSS was selectively associated with the oil and gas
phases in the deepwater plume, yet underwent negligible, or slow, rates of biodegradation in
the affected waters. These results provide important constraints on accurate modeling of the
deepwater plume and critical geochemical contexts for future toxicological studies.
Description
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of American Chemical Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Environmental Science & Technology 45 (2011):1298–1306, doi:10.1021/es103838p.
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Suggested Citation
Preprint: Kujawinski, Elizabeth B., Kido Soule, Melissa C., Valentine, David L., Boysen, Angela K., Longnecker, Krista, Redmond, Molly C., "Fate of dispersants associated with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill", 2011-01-05, https://doi.org/10.1021/es103838p, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/4332Related items
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