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Oil Spill Topic Map
Published in Yejun Wu, Oil Spill Impacts, 2016
Yejun Wu, Amanda Lehman, David J. Dunaway
Be Four times as toxic as the oil itself “Oil is toxic at 11 ppm while Corexit 9500 is toxic at only 2.61 ppm” (Trapido, 2010).No more or less harmful than competing dispersants “The EPA … reported Corexit is no more or less harmful than eight other competing dispersants” (McGowan, 2010).Common dispersant (Trapido, 2010)
The current state of knowledge for toxicity of corexit EC9500A dispersant: a review
Published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 2019
Kevin M. Stroski, Gregg Tomy, Vince Palace
COREXIT® EC9500A (formerly COREXIT 9500) is a widely used chemical dispersant developed by the Nalco company, utilizing a less toxic solvent compared to earlier formulas. This dispersant, like its predecessor COREXIT EC9527A (formerly COREXIT 9527) and many other dispersing agents utilizes nonionic and anionic surfactants along with a solvent for distribution (George-Ares & Clark, 2000; Mitchell & Holdway, 2000; Nyankson, Rodene, & Gupta, 2016). The surfactants within the mixtures generally have a hydrophilic head which keeps the particle stable in water with a lipophilic tail, allowing it to interact with the oil and decrease the oil-water interfacial tension (Major, Derbes, Wang, & Roy-Engel, 2016). In response to public outcry, the Nalco company released the formulation of Corexit EC9500A, the main ingredients being hydrotreated light petroleum distillates, a propylene glycol solvent and the primary anionic surfactant, dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate (DOSS) (Gray et al., 2014; Nalco, 2014; Parker, Ferrer, Thurman, Rosario-Ortiz & Linden, 2014; Place et al., 2016). A review of the aquatic toxicity of the oil dispersants Corexit 9500 and Corexit 9527 was published in 2000 summarizing the data until that point but following the explosion and subsequent oil and gas blowout on the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) drilling rig, many studies began to again measure the potential toxicity of these dispersants. (Almeda et al., 2014; Anderson Lively & McKenzie, 2014; George-Ares & Clark, 2000). This was due to the unprecedented use of approximately 7 million liters of dispersant over the spill including nearly 3 million of which was applied at the subsurface plume exposing previously shielded sub-surface organisms to these chemicals (Beyer, Trannum, Bakke, Hodson, & Collier, 2016). This surge of new information following the DWH spill was the impetus for this review of which the primary objectives are to summarize the new toxicological information on Corexit EC9500A and to provide context for this data with regards to potential impacts on the species studied.