In the midst of juggling between oil demand and supply, the potential of oil spills has grown in parallel with the intensifying activities in oil exploration, production, refinery, transportation, and storage. Massive oil spills have caused instant and lasting biological damage to oceanic ecosystems, coastline habitats, fisheries, and maricultures.
In addition, ocean dynamics, hectic waterways and weathering effects on the oil spill site complicate the monitoring of the oil spread and impede the implementation of clean-up measures. This has led to the need of materials and technological advancement to expedite the oil spill clean-up.
The conventional offshore oil spill response plans entail mechanical clean up (utilizing boom and skimmer), in-situ burning, bioremediation as well as the application of chemical dispersants, solidifiers, and oil sorbents.

Effective and selective removal of oil-based pollutants from the contaminated offshore water is a challenging task. Hence, the mandatory properties of an efficient oil sorbent are manifold: hydrophobic-oleophilic, high oil sorption and retention, floatable and durable in water, recyclable, biodegradable, and low cost. Inorganic and organic as well as natural sorbents have been investigated intensively, but none has proven to fulfill all requirements so far.

In this work, a simple one-step and yet low energy consumption pathway to fabricate 3D carbon-based sorbent from natural kapok fibers is presented. Without any chemical pre-treatment, the pristine kapok fibers were carbonized at relatively low temperatures (300 ⁰C). They exhibited positive buoyancy (floating), which is mainly caused by their water repellency, low density (6-8 mg/cm3, respectively), and high porosity (>98%). Surface roughness and intrinsic graphite phase were found to be critical to tune oil adhesion and sorption. Moreover, the absorbed oil is retrievable and can be recovered for subsequent use. Hence, this work provides a promising scalable production route to develop effective 3D carbon-based oil sorbents via one-step energy-saving carbonization.