Instant Room-Temperature Gelation of Crude Oil by Chiral Organogelators

Abstract

Large-scale treatment of oily water arising from frequent marine oil spills presents a major challenge to scientists and engineers. Although the recently emerged phase-selective organogelators (PSOG) do offer very best promises for oil spill treatment, there still exists a number of technical barriers to overcome collectively, including gelators’ high solubility, high gelling ability, general applicability toward crude oil of various types, rapid gelation with room temperature operation, low toxicity, and low cost. Here, a denovo-designed unusually robust molecular gelling scaffold is used for facile construction of a PSOG library and for rapid identification of PSOGs with the most sought-after practical traits. The identified gelators concurrently overcome the existing technical hurdles, and for the first time enable instant room-temperature gelation of crude oil of various types in the presence of seawater. Remarkably, these excellent gelations were achieved with the use of only 0.058–0.18 L of environmentally benign carrier solvents and 7–35 g of gelator per liter of crude oil. Significantly, 2 out of 20 gelators could further congeal crude oil in the powder form at room temperature, highlighting another excellent potential of the developed modularly tunable system in searching for more powerful powder-based gelators for oil spill treatment