New standards for oil laboratories dealing with oil spill response

ASTM International’s hazardous substances and oil spill response committee (F20) has approved two new standards that will each enhance knowledge essential for oil spill response. The new standards will be used primarily by oil laboratories.

“The new standards describe measures designed to answer the question of how sticky oil is (F3633) and how to make standard mixtures of weathered, or evaporated, oil (F3634),” says ASTM member Merv Fingas. “These standards will aid in the preparedness for oil spills should they occur.”

F3633 summarizes a method to measure the adhesion to a stainless-steel needle as a means to compare the relative adhesion of a target oil. F3634 summarizes methods to produce representative residual oil following evaporative weathering using a rotary evaporator.