Reply #5: And it will [View All]

[izquierdista]

The light fraction, the part that gets distilled into gasoline will partition off into the atmosphere. Thirty to forty percent is a bit of a highside guess, since it's not being cracked like at the refinery. The rest, the heavier fraction is still less dense than sea water, so given enough time, it will make its way to the surface and float around until it washes up somewhere. While it is floating, it will get solarized, which will break it into smaller molecules and is part of the degredation process. Microbial action will consume more of it, but that time scale could be on the order of years.

It really depends on the particle size of the oil droplets. The technical reason to add detergents and try to break it up is so that there will be small droplets with lots of surface area for the microbes to attack. Once it washes up, the amount of weathering and microbial action will pick up and the land will be the final remediation place for most of the oil.