PFAS destruction may be on the horizon?

Via Chemical and Engineering News, this interesting article about destroying PFAS (article by Cheryl Hogue): 

At a Dec. 7 hearing held jointly by two subcommittees of the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, lawmakers learned about one emerging approach to PFAS destruction, supercritical water oxidation. Battelle, a nonprofit research and development organization that does contract work mainly for the US government, presented its work developing the technology.

Battelle’s PFAS Annihilator technology relies on supercritical water plus an oxidizer to break the carbon-fluorine bonds in these persistent compounds, Amy Dindal, the organization’s director of environmental research and development, said at the hearing.

The technology uses water above its critical point of 374 °C and 22 MPa and breaks PFAS into smaller molecules including hydrofluoric acid. Sodium hydroxide is added to neutralize the acid and form sodium fluoride, the organization says in an email. Sodium sulfate also forms if the PFAS contained sulfonate functional groups. A separator removes some of the salts, the rest are released at low levels in treated water, Battelle says.

Battelle’s website says its technology works on PFAS regardless of their sizes or specific structures and lowers PFAS concentrations in water to nondetectable levels within seconds.

I like the sounds of "PFAS Annihilator" - well done, marketing team.