Chemists, Cooks: Making massive mayonnaise from oil tanker spill?; Emulsions in general clean-up

Factual Questions
1

Somewhere in the food blog Kitsch & Classics the author* suggested dropping a million egg yolks on an oil spill, running a fleet of motor boats through it, and creating mayonnaise. I don’t remember if he suggested that it could be vacuumed off, or whatever, or he just left it as a random thought.

Simple and not-so-simple descriptions of the chemistry of mayonnaise abound. I found what looks like some hard-core ones, with abstracts only on-line:

Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society
2002, Volume 79, Issue 8, pp 837-843
Rheological properties of cholesterol-reduced, yolk-stabilized mayonnaise
J. E. Moros, J. M. Franco, C. Gallegos

Third European Rheology Conference and Golden Jubilee Meeting of the British Society of Rheology
1990, pp 193-195
Dynamic Viscoelasticity of Mayonnaise Containing Different Egg Products
Antonio F. Guerrero, Hershell R. Ball

Bunch more on rheology, etc., in Google Scholar “mayonnaise.”

A customary ratio for cooks is one yolk per cup of oil; in theory a yolk can “hold” much more. An emulsifier helps: mustard powder, or prepared mustard, with it’s vinegar, is common.
SD Question #1
Would the fuel-oil mayonnaise work? Number of yolks? Take the Exxon Valdes oil spill. I don’t think converting the 260,000-750,000 barrels to cups is enough of an answer. (That absurdly imprecise range is from the Wiki.)

I think answering plaintive cries for help like this question is SD’s reason for being. Pretend I wrote that last bit in French.
SD Question #2
How are emulsions used to mitigate oil spills? If that’s too big a question, there must be many methods to attack a spill, so: how/when does working with emulsions better than other techniques?
*Who I want to be when I grow up. His pâtés, terrines, and galantines are a mix (heh) of Miró, Rothko, and Stella.

2

oil is more easily cleaned if it stays separate from the water. it can be boomed and skimmed. out on the open water this is better.

there are circumstances and situations where emulsions might be of benefit depending on what kind of oil and where the oil has ended up on shore.

3

Mayo tends to be made with vegetable oil, which is a little different than crude oil. I doubt that crude oil emulsifies as well.

4

I tend to agree with mcgato, but I’m wondering if you could get “fractional emulsification”.
Lighter fractions are mayonized, heavier stuff is dense and unsticky enough to settle harmlessly.

But how to spread out the yolks? Crop duster plane?

Also, what about the leftover eggwhites?
Meringue might make a floaty barrier.

5

Not in the sense you are thinking. Oil water emulsions do get created in oils spills, particularly where there is strong wave action. And IIRC emulsions do break down faster than oil by itself because bacteria can get at the oil better. This is why a technique for combatting minor spills can be to simply break the spill up with prop wash: oil mixed and spread out will break down faster.

However, your idea for setting out to create an emulsion is probably not useful for a large spill even ignoring the problem of getting enough eggs. To create an emulsion you need not just emulsifier but to mix vigorously. If you are physically interacting with the oil enough to mix it into an emulsion, why not just skim the stuff up?

6

Crude and bunker oil spills contain a significant portion of heavy oil fractions, and they are the problematic part: they don’t readily evaporate or break down, and they are notoriously sticky and obnoxious. So if you are right about what would occur using the OP’s technique, then the OP has solved the part of the problem that isn’t much of a problem anyway, and left the difficult part of the problem unresolved.

7

While you’re at it, also grind up sufficient tuna fish in the mix, then skim it all up and you’ll have tuna salad. Yum.

8

In what way is this supposed to make the situation better? It is creating even more pollution than there was before. The oil is floating on top of the water anyway, so if “vacuuming off” is the next stage you have not made it easier, and the “mayonnaise” you created, assuming the emulsification wold work (and at best I think it would take a lot of motorboating through) would be no more edible than the original oil.

Also, all those eggs would be very expensive, and separating all those yolks would not be cheap either.

9

It would probably be easier to spread lecithin over the oil spill. Lecithin is the main emulsifier in egg yolks, although pure lecithin is usually obtained from cheaper sources such as soybeans. It’s available in granular form, so you don’t have to worry about spoilage.

As others have already pointed out, this technique probably wouldn’t help much in cleaning up an oil spill. It would take a lot of time, energy and money, and the emulsifier probably wouldn’t help much with the heavy fractions.

10

Another draw back would be maintaining the emulsions stability. The usual technique is to add the oil to the emulsifier to immediately disperse the oil droplets.

Reversing this step as you suggest by adding the emulsifier to the oil or having a surplus of oil would result in coalescence of the oil droplets, with the majority of the oil “weeping” back out of the attempted emulsion ( As anyone who’s had their heart broken by Hollandaise can attest…).

11

Thanks to all. Interesting stuff.

As I asked in OP: what are these situations, and what about them (oil type? simply amount of oil?) that encourage using or thinking about emulsification? Eg, in the “minor spills” mentioned below.

Ital added.

Didn’t quite get that. Ital sentence is positive, for the reasons you mention, in preventing emulsification? And your last sentence means that prop wash–propeller action churning stuff up? or throwing more and more water?–breaks it? I thought it would promote it. Although I know from cooking an emulsion won’t form if the two liquids are beaten to fast initially. Once you’ve got a mayo emulsion, and I believe, but am not sure, a set-up hollandaise (butter, a different oil), you can whip it to your heart’s content and it won’t break.

You’re right, of course, but in this forum true usefulness is never absolutely required (cf. innumerable “bridge to the moon,” “corralling the sun” threads). :slight_smile:

But a little more seriously, I had a quick mental image that pushing the damn stuff, although now heavier of course with the seawater, would still offer an advantage.

Which brings to mind: how does salt effect emulsification?

Which leads to…

What are–within the confines of a post and a layman’s reading of it–those fractions (I will look this up immediately after this post)–relative to the composition of olive oil? I’m not sure if that sentence even makes sense. Essentially, can you give a few more details on how crude oil differs from olive oil, relative to what we are talking about, aside from the fact that you’d die from one and not the other?

Don’t get this, either as or someone trying to learn the chemistry and physical formation of fuel oil-spill emulsions, or as a cook. I don’t know why the dispersion medium is privileged. I’ve never tried it, but this technique apparently works (everything nice and settled and blended bottom up with an immersion blender).

I’'m going to take Wiki Emulsions to the woodshed and get back all of you. I should have chowed down on that article a while ago. Something tells me it would be helpful in this thread…

12

Sorry my sentence was confusing. You are talking about what breaks the emulsion down into oil. I was talking about the oil being broken down by bacteria. In other words, IIRC emulsions can be better because mixing of the oil with water into emulsion allows bacteria to break the oil down. Not because mixing or prop wash breaks the emulsion down.

I’m no chemist. However, olive oil would be a reasonably consistent substance ie essentially one thing. Crude oil is a mix of everything from very light fractions like gasoline through to tar. Bunker oil is the same but with all the light fractions taken out, ie it is mix of heavier oils. Bunker oil is so viscose it won’t even flow unless heated above room temperature.

13

In major spills (think Mancondo) the majority of the oil was emulsified. The emulsifier is called a dispersant, but the idea is the same. With Mancondo, dispersant was pumped into the oil as soon as they could - at the well head on the sea floor. But they also sprayed it onto the sea surface. As Princhester says, the crucial value is in allowing microbial action to start as soon as possible, and with a big surface area, as fast as possible. The microbes eat the oil, and can digest pretty much any fraction in the droplet. The main ones used in the Mancondo disaster were Corexit 9500 and Corexit 9527, and 1.2 million gallons were used. (The level of conspiracy accusations and plain bad science spouted by the usual suspects of such theories about the effects of these dispersants during and after the disaster was remarkable. The Wikipedea page on Corexit is a great example of the problems Wikipedea has with contentious subjects colliding with fact.)