Analysis of Hazards of Dispersant Constituents and Review of Toxicological Studies

Abstract

The response to the 2010 Macondo oil well blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico used significant quantities of dispersants. The materials that comprise the oil dispersant, COREXIT 9500® present minimal toxicities. Risk to spill responders would be reduced through the use of personal protective equipment. At the time, oil spill dispersants were not well understood outside of the oil spill response industry. The apparent data gap resulted in a rush to generate data on these materials without consideration of the existing toxicity data used by the consumer product industry. A review of new in vitro and in vivo toxicology studies indicated numerous examples where the study design was not clearly defined, leading to difficulties in the evaluation of study quality and uncertain relevance of the studies to human health risk assessment. The lack of transparent communication of the results to the scientific investigators and the public has led to a mistrust of oil dispersants, due to a misunderstanding of their potential hazards and risks to human health. This paper will examine the hazardous properties of individual dispersant constituents and technological considerations of published toxicology studies of oil spill dispersants. This summary will objectively evaluate oil dispersant ingredients for human health risk assessments and provide guidance to future scientific investigators on high quality study designs.

Characterization of Lipopeptides Biosurfactants Produced by a Newly Isolated Strain Bacillus Subtilis ZNI5: Potential Environmental Application

“…In addition to oil dispersion, dispersants agents have application in oil chemistry eld as they have great role in desorption of hydrophobic molecules from rock surfaces enhancing their mobility and recovery. However, chemical dispersants have great hazardous effects to marine and soil ecosystems and cause great toxicities to living organisms (Kleindienst et al 2015, Popovech 2017). Also, they can suppress the activity of oil degrading micro-organisms when applied to the oil-contaminated seawater to disperse surface slicks into smaller droplets that are presumed to be more bio-available to microorganisms (Kleindienst et al 2015).…”