(Sept. 30, 2026 / JNS)
This is the first article in a new JNS series, “Made in Israel,” highlighting Israeli scientific and technological innovations that are making an impact around the world and explaining the science behind them.
In February 2021, black lumps of tar began washing onto beaches along Israel’s Mediterranean coast. The pollution eventually affected a large stretch of the eastern Mediterranean shoreline, leaving beaches coated with petroleum residue and prompting a major cleanup effort. For a country with only about 195 kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, and much of its population and critical infrastructure concentrated near it, the episode was a reminder that an oil spill far offshore can quickly become a problem on land.
The first hours after such a spill are often a race against the sea itself. Most oils float, spreading across the surface while winds and currents carry them away from the point of release. Responders can surround parts of the slick with floating barriers and then use specialized vessels to skim oil from the surface. Other materials can be deployed to soak it up. But waves, currents and rough weather complicate the work, and the farther the slick spreads, the more difficult it becomes to contain.
Even if containment is successful, responders immediately face a further challenge: What happens to the oil afterward?
Mechanical cleanup usually removes petroleum from the sea rather than destroying it. Oil collected by skimmers must be stored, separated from water and eventually recycled or disposed of. Oil-soaked cleanup materials pose a similar problem. Other methods reduce the need for disposal while introducing their own environmental trade-offs. Chemical dispersants break a slick into much smaller droplets that enter the water, while controlled burning can destroy part of a surface spill under suitable conditions. Each has its own role and limitations.
Researchers at Ben-Gurion University have been working on a different approach: a material designed not only to capture petroleum but to help nature break it down afterward. In laboratory experiments, the researchers showed that these two processes—physical capture and biological degradation—could be combined.
To understand how, it helps to begin with the unusual material at the center of the system: an almost weightless, highly porous solid capable of pulling many times its own mass in petroleum out of water.
A graphic illustrates how Ben-Gurion University researchers produce a nutrient-enriched cellulose aerogel designed to absorb oil spills and promote their biodegradation by naturally occurring microorganisms. Credit: Ben-Gurion University.
A sponge to clean the oceans
The material at the center of the Ben-Gurion University system is an aerogel, a solid built around an extraordinarily open microscopic structure. Rather than resembling a dense block, an aerogel is more like a delicate three-dimensional framework filled mostly with empty space. That makes it extremely light while providing a vast internal surface on which other substances can collect.
The researchers built theirs from cellulose, the structural material found throughout plants and familiar from products such as paper. The cellulose is converted into a carbon-rich, highly porous aerogel, producing a material with a crucial property for oil-spill cleanup: It strongly resists being wetted by water.
That distinction matters because an oil adsorbent deployed at sea faces an obvious challenge: It is surrounded by vastly more water than petroleum. A useful material must therefore do more than simply soak up liquids indiscriminately. The carbonized aerogel is designed so that water largely stays outside while petroleum spreads through and clings to its porous structure.
In laboratory tests, that structure proved highly effective. Under the best-performing preparation conditions reported in the 2026 study, one gram of the nutrient-supplemented aerogel adsorbed about 78 grams of crude oil, roughly 80 times its own mass.
The number is striking, but it is not, by itself, the main scientific advance. Carbon-based cellulose aerogels capable of taking up large quantities of oil existed before this work.
The main innovation lies in what the researchers added to the sponge—and in the microorganisms they hoped would find it.
A laboratory demonstration shows aerogel absorbing an oil-like liquid from water over 90 minutes, leaving the surrounding water clear. Credit: Ben-Gurion University.
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A nursery for bacteria
Oil-eating bacteria may sound like something engineered for a laboratory, but they are already part of the natural marine environment. Numerous microorganisms can use petroleum hydrocarbons as sources of carbon and energy, and after major spills their populations can increase sharply. During the Deepwater Horizon disaster, for example, researchers documented the enrichment of indigenous bacteria capable of degrading hydrocarbons in contaminated deep water.
The difficulty is that oil alone does not give those microbes everything they need. Petroleum may suddenly provide an enormous supply of carbon, but bacterial growth also depends on nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. In some oil-contaminated environments, those nutrients become the limiting factor: The microorganisms have abundant fuel but not enough of the other ingredients required to multiply and remain active.
Scientists have tried to solve this problem before. After the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, fertilizers were applied to parts of the affected shoreline to stimulate naturally occurring oil-degrading bacteria, and subsequent studies found that nutrient addition could accelerate biodegradation.
The challenge is delivery: Nutrients released into open water can disperse or wash away instead of remaining where the petroleum and microbes actually meet.
The Ben-Gurion team’s key step was to build that nutrient supply into the aerogel itself. Nitrogen and phosphorus were incorporated into the carbonized material and, in laboratory tests, remained bound to it rather than simply leaching away. The same porous structure that captures the oil also gives microorganisms a surface on which to attach, bringing the petroleum, bacteria and nutrients into one place.
That integration appears to matter. In the researchers’ experiments, the nutrient-bearing aerogel increased both the rate and extent of biodegradation compared with similar aerogel without the added nutrients. The material therefore does more than collect the spill: It creates conditions that help biological cleanup begin where the oil has been concentrated.
Looking toward the future
The researchers themselves are careful not to present the aerogel as a finished cleanup technology.
“It worked in the lab. Now a company has to be established to test it in the sea,” Prof. Ariel Kushmaro said in a September interview.
Kushmaro, who led the research along with Dr. Danit Lisa Karsagi Biron at BGU’s Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory, estimated that practical development would still take years. He said the next stage would be to test the sponge’s effectiveness in a polluted marina.
“There is oil in every port,” he said.
The sea is a far less forgiving laboratory. The published experiments used artificial seawater under controlled conditions. A real spill would subject the material to waves and currents, changing temperatures and salinity, weathered mixtures of petroleum and very different microbial communities.
Kushmaro said the sponge was designed for use beyond the laboratory and that he expected it to perform well in field tests.
“It takes between two and three weeks for the oil to disappear. If the oil spill is in the middle of the sea, it can be dropped from a plane. The cellular material itself is biodegradable. We don’t believe that waves, currents and changing temperatures would interfere with the cleanup,” he said.
The ambition, however, is broader than a laboratory demonstration.
“We dream about the possibility that every ship will have the aerogel on board, so that if it causes an oil spill, it can immediately break it down. They can immediately cause it to disintegrate before it causes damage,” Kushmaro said.
“Shell, the global British multinational energy and petrochemical company, has already contacted us to ask for information about it,” he added.
As commercial interest grows and testing moves beyond the laboratory, the Israeli innovation now faces its most important test. If it can navigate the scientific and commercial challenges ahead, the aerogel sponge could make the leap from an elegant scientific solution to a practical piece of maritime infrastructure protecting the world’s seas and oceans.