A Huge Oil Spill Naturally under Control in Abadan Refinery

Abstract

Abstract A rapidly expanding chemical and petroleum industry has been responsible for great improvements in the quality of urban areas in Iran over the last 100 years. The Abadan Refinery is located between the Arvandrud and Bahmanshir rivers in the highly populated Abadan city. These rivers supplies urban, industrial, and agricultural waters to Abadan city. During the war between Iran and Iraq, leakage of enormous volumes of oil and refined petroleum products from storage tanks and pipelines at the Abadan refinery to the surrounding environment occurred. Underground contamination resulted from that leakage is a serious and a growing enviromental concern in Abadan city. In this work, twenty boreholes were investigated by considering petroleum leakage to the surrounding area during and after the war. Geological conditions, stratigraphy and petroleum contamination underlying the Abadan refinery was determined from cores during the drilling of the boreholes. Oil saturation of cores was defined for each borehole. Also, porosity, and density of the cores were measured in this project. The extent of the petroleum contaminated underground layers was determined in this study and the average depth of contaminated undrground layers is from the surface to the depth of 4.5 meter. Leakaged oil in place in underground layers of Abadan refinery was estimated to be 6,424,674 barrels. The results show that the majority of existing petroleum in underground layers at Abadan refinery was absorbed by clay.