Assessment of emerging onboard wastewater decanting technologies for sustainable marine oil spill response: A life...

Effective management of recovered fluids (RF) is critical for sustainable marine oil spill response. This study provides a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) and cost analysis (LCCA) of three RF management approaches, including a conventional "transportation-to-onshore treatment" approach and two onboard decanting approaches based on emerging systems: micro/nanobubbles flotation coupled with fiber ball adsorption (MNBFA) and submerged hollow fiber membrane ultrafiltration (SHFMU). The environmental impacts were assessed using ReCiPe 2016 and Impact2002+ methods on field-collected material usage and emission data. The results show that the conventional approach poses the highest environmental impact across all endpoint categories, exceeding the onboard decanting approaches by 27%-99%, primarily driven by onshore wastewater treatment. MNBFA demonstrates superior environmental performance over SHFMU, with a 6.8% lower resource depletion impact. Monte Carlo simulations confirm the environmental advantage of the onboard decanting approaches under data variations. The oil content of RF greatly influences the impacts via the recovered oil refining process: when the refinery process is included, low oil content leads to the lowest environmental impact, whereas medium oil content is the case when the refinery process is excluded. LCCA indicates that both onboard approaches achieve an oil recovery rate of 97% and result in significantly lower total costs compared to the conventional approach, with cost reductions of over 85%. These findings underscore the considerable environmental advantages of onboard decanting while simultaneously alleviating economic burdens.