MIT chemical engineers make potentially game-changing breakthrough with crude oil: ‘Creates a new way to apply it’

A team of chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented a new process to separate crude oil components, potentially bringing forward a replacement that can cut its harmful carbon pollution by 90%.

The original technique, which uses heat to separate crude oil into gasoline, diesel, and heating oil, accounts for roughly 1% of all global energy consumption and 6% of dirty energy pollution from the carbon dioxide it releases.

“Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size?” said Zachary P. Smith, associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study, per Interesting Engineering.

The team invented a polymer membrane that divides crude oil into its various uses like a sieve.

The new process follows a similar strategy used by the water industry for desalination, which uses reverse osmosis membranes and has been around since the 1970s.

Previous attempts to adapt this process for crude oil have had the hurdle of the membrane swelling and interfering with successful separation. By replacing the amide bond with an imide bond instead, the team made the film more hydrophobic, allowing hydrocarbons to pass through the membrane without this issue arising.

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“The main advantage of interfacial polymerization is it’s already a well-established method to prepare membranes for water purification, so you can imagine just adopting these chemistries into existing scale of manufacturing lines,” lead author Tae Hoon Lee explained, per IE.

While protecting the planet from rapid overheating will take scaling down dirty fuel sources in favor of renewable energy sources like solar and wind, this innovation is a substantial step in maximizing the industrial efficiency of oil processing if brought to commercial scale. The technology has also opened the door to imitating its success with other organic systems, with the potential to use different membranes in tandem to isolate a variety of chemicals in complex mixtures.

“This work takes the workhorse technology of the membrane desalination industry … and creates a new way to apply it to organic systems,” said Andrew Livingston, a chemical engineering professor at Queen Mary University of London, per IE.

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