유류오염 토양-지하수 복원기술: 문제와 개선방향

Soil and groundwater contamination by petroleum hydrocarbon products is only one of many environmental problems in Korea. However, many environmental consulting companies have been targeted their business on this subject because the petroleum-oil-lubricant (POL) products have been widely used product and accidental releases of the products from storages resulted numerous small and large contaminated sites throughout Korea. Therefore, many small and large companies are actively participating in environmental assessment and remediation projects for the POL contaminated sites. Remedial technologies for the POL contaminated sites have been developed for many years by government and private institutions throughout the world. Development of a new decontamination technology for the POL contaminated sites is no longer attractive issue in research community because scientific bases of most cost-effective remedial technologies are well understood and have been used in the field by commercial sector. Numerous sites contaminated by underground tanks at gas stations have been remediated by relatively small companies in this country. We should appreciate their noticeable contributions as a frontier under very difficult market environment in Korea. We heard many successful stories as well as a few failure stories. Soil-groundwater remediation of POL contaminated site is not a simple task as shown in the text books or protocols. Therefore, failure risk is always with us, which requires continuous efforts for improvement of the technologies by the users and developers. In this presentation, author will discuss technical problems encountered and improvement made during implementation of several remedial technologies applied by Samsung Environmental Team. This is not a presentation about research or case study. We want to share our thought and experience with environmental engineers actively engaged in soil and groundwater remediation projects in Korea.