By two o’clock on a late fall afternoon on Alaska’s North Slope, the sun is already setting and the well structures are casting long purple shadows, turning the snowy landscape into a postmodern version of Monet’s haystack paintings. In the midst of this scene stands Ian Buist, a chemical engineer who works with the U.S. Minerals Management Service, putting the finishing touches on a spill. Clad in several coats, coveralls, a yellow Tyvek suit, a flotation vest, and a hard hat with insulated flaps, Buist has made six oil spills today and hundreds more in 23 years of studying their physical chemistry. He measures out two gallons of crude and pours it evenly onto a six-foot pancake of broken ice floating in 16,000 gallons of seawater.  

Courtesy of SL Ross Environmental Research

As an oil spill burns, the oil thins out and spreads across the water, extinguishing the flames. At a test tank in Ottawa, Canada, engineers experiment with a fire-resistant barrier that can contain the oil. A properly controlled burn can consume 90 percent of a spill.


“Every crude oil is different, and every well is different,” Buist says. He tosses in two sandwich bags that each contain precisely four ounces of napalm—a mixture of fatty acids and gasoline that forms a flammable jelly—and watches his spill go up in three-foot flames. For a minute or two, the fire takes the chill off the Arctic night, but then it dies, leaving a sludge that cools to resemble cheap chocolate.

No two oil spills of the six he’s igniting burn the same, and some burn weakly before sputtering out. Buist is trying to learn if fire can be used to clean up oil spills on slushy ice during the fall—conditions considered too dangerous for cleanup workers operating out of boats.

Chemical engineers tend to talk about oil’s complex chemistry the way gourmets talk about fine wine. In a spill, they say, everything is variable: the height of the waves, the temperature of the air, and the origin and the age of the oil. Even the ice makes a difference. Buist’s colleague, environmental engineer David Dickins, hoists a VCR-size chunk of sea ice above his head and points to the columns that stripe its surface. Between the columns lie chambers of brine that can draw spilled oil into the ice, he says. Once inside, a spill can travel with ice floes.

Over the past 15 years, Buist, Dickins, and other researchers working with the Minerals Management Service have developed sophisticated booms to contain spills, and skimmers and mechanical brushes to remove oil from water. They’ve tested dispersants to break up slicks, used cheerleader pom-poms to soak up oil, and developed software to predict the behavior of smoke from a burning spill. They’ve even developed a machine out of Dr. Seuss that removes oily ice chunks from water and scrubs them down. None of these methods can prevent oil spills, but they’ve helped make cleanups more efficient and predictable and helped prevent catastrophes in Alaska, off the coast of Oregon, and elsewhere.

Oil and water form a miniature slick in the laboratory.