US EPA

8753781 

Meetings & Symposia 

Development and evaluation of mid-range Benchtop FTIR as an integrated tool for emergency oil spill response 

Watson, K; Lambert, P; Goldthorp, M; Hatfield, G; Cyr, M; Nasim, A; Bella-Matadamas, Y 

2021 

Environment Canada 

149-174 

English 

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s (ECCC), Emergencies Science and Technology Section (ESTS) has an established program to review current detection and monitoring techniques for use at an oil spill incident. For the past 7 years the ESTS has researched, reviewed, and developed a variety of methods, for use with a mid-range benchtop Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer (FTIR), which could be used at an oil spill response. The methods reviewed include: - Qualification of oil by Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR); - Qualification of Water Accumulated Fractions (WAFs) by Horizontal ATR (HATR); - ASTM D7678 – 17 Total Oil and Grease (TOG) and Total Petroleum Hydrocarbon (TPH) in Water by Transmission FTIR; and - Quantification of the surface-washing agent Corexit® EC9580A (EC9580A) in saltwater by Transmission FTIR. In addition to the methods, a variety of resources for the FTIR were created including an ATR spectral library of 250+ oils/weathering fractions plus various surfactants/surface washing agents, one pager documents for field deployments, a deployment primer document for the FTIR, and SOPs including QA-QC controls for non-standard methods. The objective of this paper is to summarize the work done by ESTS on the development of the FTIR as a field portable instrument as well as display how this instrument could be potentially deployed and used in an emergency response situation. © 2021 Proceedings of the 43rd AMOP Technical Seminar on Environmental Contamination and Response. All rights reserved.