Electro-reclamation, a versatile soil remediation solution

Work on electrokinetic technology started in the Netherlands around 1985 with Geokinetics. In 1994 the company teamed up with Hak Milieutechniek (HMT), which became full owner of the company in 1999. This paper briefly compares and contrasts Geokinetics' and HMT's commercially driven approach with that of the more traditional and academic approach adopted by many other workers in the field. It outlines our primary attention and focus on electrokinetic technology to solubilize and recover ionic contamination from ground and groundwater. The simple fact that most of the contaminated sites all over the world contain more often than not a mixture of both inorganic and organic components forced us to extend the use of electricity to cope with all sorts of pollution. The knowledge we gained and the challenges of this opportunity lead us to the development of electro-remediation, a combination of techniques having electricity as the common denominator: electrokinetic recovery of inorganic contamination and electroheated recovery of organic contamination in combination with soil vapour extraction and low flow groundwater extraction; electroheated and electrokinetically enhanced biodegradation in combination with addition of nutrients and electron donors or acceptors; electrokinetic containment and remediation of polluted sites and groundwater plumes. The paper gives an overview and description of a number of benchmark projects in the aforementioned areas. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.