Effect of Charcoal and Active Carbon as Filter Media on Electrokinetic Remediated Crude Oil-Contaminated Soil

Abstract

Research has shown that traditional electrokinetic remediation (EKR) technology has limited efficiency against different contaminants and soils. This has led to the use of several strategies to enhance the traditional EKR for higher contaminants removal efficiency. This paper separately uses charcoal and active carbon (AC) each 1 cm thick as filter media in EKR to enhance the removal of crude oil from crude oil-contaminated soil (COCS) containing 78,600 mg/kg of crude oil. The filters are placed very close to the anode compartment containing 0.01 M NaOH electrolytes. Graphite electrodes are used in a face-to-face configuration to pass 1 V DC/cm through the COCS. Crude oil removal efficiencies of 81.4% and 84.6%, respectively, are obtained from the EKR setups containing charcoal and AC filters after 18 and 14 days of remediation, respectively. This makes AC a better filter medium than charcoal for COCS. The results of the chemical oxides compositions show improvement from non-lateritic COCS to lateritic for the filter media-enhanced EKR soil, although AC has proven to be a better filter medium compared to charcoal for use in enhancing EKR technology for COCS. Nonetheless, with over 80% removal efficiency, charcoal or AC filters can be used to enhance EKR remediation of COCS.

Received: 3 November 2023 | Revised: 30 November 2023 | Accepted: 8 December 2023

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://doi.org/10.4314/njt.v42i2.3.

Author Contribution Statement

Kabiru Adebayo: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Project administration, Funding acquisition; John Sani Engbonye: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - review & editing, Supervision; Abdulrahman Musa: Resources; Moses George: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision; Ige Olumide Oluwasanmi: Investigation, Supervision.