Public health impacts of an imminent Red Sea oil spill

Abstract

The possibility of a massive oil spill in the Red Sea is increasingly likely. The Safer, a deteriorating oil tanker containing 1.1 million barrels of oil, has been deserted near the coast of Yemen since 2015 and threatens environmental catastrophe to a country presently in a humanitarian crisis. Here, we model the immediate public health impacts of a simulated spill. We estimate that all of Yemen’s imported fuel through its key Red Sea ports would be disrupted and that the anticipated spill could disrupt clean-water supply equivalent to the daily use of 9.0–9.9 million people, food supply for 5.7–8.4 million people and 93–100% of Yemen’s Red Sea fisheries. We also estimate an increased risk of cardiovascular hospitalization from pollution ranging from 5.8 to 42.0% over the duration of the spill. The spill and its potentially disastrous impacts remain entirely preventable through offloading the oil. Our results stress the need for urgent action to avert this looming disaster.

Facile Construction of Robust and Powerful Biochar-Decorated Porous Foams with Super-Wettability for Automatic and Continuous Oil Spill Remediation

“…When a small liquid droplet is dripped onto a solid surface, a three-phase contact line will form after just touch. Because of the smooth surface of pure CF, its wetting state can be expressed by Young's equation (Figure 3f) 42 = + cos sv sl lv (1) where θ is the contact angle in the Young's model and γ sv , γ sl , and γ lv represent the interfacial surface tension of the solid− vapor, solid−liquid, and liquid−vapor interfaces, respectively. Hence, the wettability of CF is determined by the surface free energy.…”

“…Accordingly, the treatment of oily wastewater and the remediation of oil spill have become thorny issues facing the world. 1,2 Up to now, various oil/water separation methods, such as skimming, centrifugation, flotation, coalescence, filtration, and so on, have been reported. 3−5 However, these methods possess some drawbacks of poor separation efficiency, high costs, and being time-consuming.…”

A Self‐Powered and Efficient Triboelectric Dehydrator for Separating Water‐in‐Oil Emulsions with Ultrahigh Moisture Content

“…Equation (5) indicates that the emulsion is subjected to an electric field mainly induced by the inhomogeneity of the dielectric constant. In electro-hydrodynamics theory, it can be calculated equivalently by the Maxwell stress tensor.…”

“…Meanwhile, Figure 4 shows the effects on electric field intensity and dielectric force. The effective parameters include water droplet size, position, and the dielectric constant of oil, in which the size and position of water droplets reflect the impact of the inhomogeneity of the dielectric constant mentioned in Equation (5). Figure 4a,b illustrates the electric field intensity and dielectric force variation around a single water droplet and two water droplets at different angles.…”

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Oil-water emulsions generated by oil production and other human activities are extremely harmful to the environment, [1,2] ecology, [3,4] and human health, [5] if they are not appropriately treated. Several oil-water separation technologies exist to treat these oil-water emulsions, such as physical separation methods, chemical demulsification, and electric dehydration.

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