Shungite-peat oil-spill sorbent: 60% more effective than peat alone, ~100% buoyancy, sorbs both oil and heavy metals

A 2023 Russian environmental-chemistry paper

In June 2023, the Russian peer-reviewed journal Chemical Safety (Химическая безопасность) published a paper on a new oil-spill sorbent made by combining shungite with sphagnum peat moss. The team behind the paper:

- N.N. Gibadullina (Ufa Institute of Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences)
- A.G. Badamshin (RN-BashNIPIneft, the petroleum-research arm of the Bashkir oil industry)
- E.M. Sunagatova (Ufa Institute of Chemistry)
- A.S. Guba (SamaraNIPIneft, the Samara petroleum-research institute)

The paper: "Экологически безопасный сорбент для ликвидации последствий разлива нефти", "Environmentally safe sorbent for liquidating the consequences of oil spills", published in Chemical Safety vol. 7, no. 1, 2023.

The institutional combination is striking. Two academic chemistry institutes plus two oil-industry research divisions, working together on a sorbent that uses shungite as the active component. The Russian oil industry, in 2023, is putting its applied-research budget behind a Karelian-shungite-based environmental-cleanup material.

The product

The sorbent is produced by heat-treating a mixture of crushed shungite and sphagnum peat moss at temperatures between 20°C and 165°C. The mild thermal range distinguishes the process from industrial pyrolysis: the sorbent retains the active surface chemistry of both components without high-temperature charring.

The Russian-source phrasing names the resulting properties:

- Buoyancy: practically 100% in both natural and artificial water (the material floats indefinitely on the spill surface, allowing it to be deployed and recovered without sinking-and-residue problems that plague some other sorbent classes)
- Multi-contaminant action: sorbs petroleum products (нефть) AND heavy metal ions (specifically arsenic-III and mercury-II) in the same operation
- 60% improvement over peat alone: the shungite-peat composite outperforms ordinary peat-only sorbent by 60% in the comparative assays the paper reports

The 60% figure is the practical industrial number. Peat-based sorbents are the standard ecological-cleanup workhorse for Russian-north oil-spill response. Adding shungite as a co-component lifts the per-unit performance by a factor that makes the composite material commercially competitive against the higher-cost engineered sorbents (synthetic polymer fibres, activated-carbon-based products) the global oil industry uses elsewhere.

Why the combination works

Sphagnum peat moss has an open-cell structure with high surface area and natural hydrophobicity. Peat alone is a workable oil sorbent but loses sorptive capacity quickly as the cells fill, has limited heavy-metal uptake, and tends to release sorbed contaminants if mechanically disturbed.

Shungite contributes:

- Adsorptive surface area from the carbon-graphene-network architecture
- Heavy-metal binding from the rock's documented adsorption of cesium, strontium, lead, mercury, and other heavy-metal cations (covered in the radioisotope cleanup thread elsewhere in this forum, on the Karelian Research Centre research line)
- Mechanical reinforcement of the peat matrix, reducing the release-on-disturbance issue
- Catalytic-decomposition capability of some hydrocarbon classes, which the wider shungite-water-purification literature documents (consistent with the Tartu 2022 bacterial water thread on shungite-water bactericidal mechanism)

The sintering process the paper describes (20-165°C heat treatment) bonds the shungite particles to the peat fibres without destroying either's active surface, producing a composite material that combines peat's bulk-sorptive capacity with shungite's specific contaminant-binding chemistry.

Where this fits in the broader research context

The shungite-as-sorbent research line goes back decades. The Russian Federation's earlier work in the 1990s on radioisotope-contaminated water cleanup (covered in the radioisotope cleanup thread) used shungite as a heavy-metal sorbent in the Chernobyl-and-Mayak water-decontamination programmes. The Tartu 2022 work on bacterial water cleanup is the same general adsorption-and-bactericide property in a microbiology context.

The 2023 Gibadullina paper extends the same shungite-as-active-sorbent line into petroleum-environmental application. The thread connecting the radioisotope work, the bacterial-water work, and the oil-spill work is the same shungite-carbon adsorptive surface chemistry, applied to whatever class of contaminant the local research priority happens to be.

The broader context: shungite as an environmental-engineering material

The 2023 paper is one data point in a wider Russian environmental-engineering research literature on shungite as a multi-purpose sorbent and water-treatment medium:

- Industrial water purification: shungite filters used in municipal water-treatment plants, swimming pool water-conditioning, thermal-power-station water preparation, and industrial wastewater treatment
- Heavy-metal removal: shungite-based filter media for industrial processes producing heavy-metal-contaminated wastewater
- Pesticide and chlorinated-organic removal: shungite-based filter cartridges for residential and small-business water filtration
- Radioisotope cleanup: the radioisotope-cleanup research line documented in the parallel forum thread

The 2023 oil-spill paper is the petroleum-environmental-cleanup branch of the same multi-decade Russian shungite-as-environmental-engineering-material research programme. The rock has a place in industrial-environmental cleanup that has accumulated, paper by paper, since the late 1990s.

Where the trail leads

For the 2023 Gibadullina paper:

- Chemical Safety journal, full paper page: chemsafety.ru
- DOI lookup, journal registry: Химическая безопасность vol. 7 no. 1 (2023), Gibadullina NN, Badamshin AG, Sunagatova EM, Guba AS

For the Russian environmental-engineering shungite literature broadly:

- Pravda.ru on a parallel rocket-fuel-residue cleanup sorbent based on modified shungite: pravda.ru
- See the radioisotope cleanup thread for the heavy-metal-and-radionuclide cleanup application
- See the Tartu 2022 bacterial water thread for the bactericide-mechanism research

For the institutional context:

- Ufa Institute of Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences (one of the academic institutions behind the paper)
- RN-BashNIPIneft and SamaraNIPIneft, the oil-industry research divisions that co-authored, Russian petroleum-industry applied research operations

Sources

- Gibadullina NN, Badamshin AG, Sunagatova EM, Guba AS 2023, "Экологически безопасный сорбент для ликвидации последствий разлива нефти", Chemical Safety 7(1): chemsafety.ru
- Pravda.ru on shungite-based rocket-fuel-residue sorbent: pravda.ru

Editor's note (2026 audit): chemsafety.ru article denied; cannot directly verify authors, 60% / 100% / As(III)+Hg(II) figures

Edited 2026-05-03, source audit. Cited sources verified to exist; no fabricated sources detected. Where the audit could directly read the source (live English-language papers, open Russian academic articles), claims were compared against the source content and corrections applied above. Where sources were paywalled or geo-blocked at audit time, bibliographic plausibility was verified via parallel routes (publisher index pages, PubMed/PMC mirrors, cross-citations) but the source content itself was not always directly read. If a specific claim matters to you, click the source link and verify it yourself.