NDLI: Manufactured Gas Plant Tars: What Are They and What Can We Do About Them?

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Manufactured Gas Plant Tars: What Are They and What Can We Do About Them?

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Hauswirth, Scott G.
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	Manufactured gas plants (MGPs) were common in the U.S. and Europe between the early 1800s and the 1950s. These plants produced town gas, a flammable gas that was used primarily for heating and lighting, from coal and petroleum products. Tars were produced as a by-product of this process and were frequently released into the environment through poor disposal practices or leaks in holding tanks and piping. The tars are complex mixtures containing thousands of compounds, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heterocyclic compounds, phenols, and asphaltenes. The tars do not readily dissolve or degrade and are therefore persistent contaminants, leaching PAHs into groundwater and posing a significant risk to human and ecological health. MGP tars also have several properties that make them notoriously difficult to remediate. They are denser than water, allowing them to migrate to depths which make direct removal impractical, and their high viscosities and ability to alter the wetting characteristics of porous media result in inefficient removal by traditional pump-and-treat methods. To improve tar removal, alkaline-polymer flushing, a method borrowed from the petroleum industry, is applied to the remediation of MGP tars. In the presence of high pH solutions, organic acids in the tars are deprotonated to form surfactants, greatly reducing the tar-water interfacial tension and decreasing the forces trapping tar in porous media. Solutions containing sodium hydroxide and xanthan gum, a natural polymer, were found to reduce the amount of tar in contaminated soils by up to 93% in column studies. These results suggest that although several open issues remain, such a method may have a place in the remediation of MGP sites.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://sph.unc.edu/files/2013/07/hauswirth.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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