Sustainable gelators: carbohydrate innovations in hydrocarbon recovery

Water pollution from hydrocarbons remains a critical global challenge, with unregu-lated releases causing severe environmental harm. Despite extensive efforts involving bacterial remediation, dispersants, solidifiers, and other traditional methods, the limi-tations of energy-intensive and ecologically damaging approaches have become in-creasingly evident. Emerging as a transformative solution, phase-selective organo-gelators (PSOGs) offer a sustainable, efficient alternative, particularly in their capacity to selectively target and recover spilled oils and aromatic hydrocarbons. This work explores the untapped potential of bio-based PSOGs, which represent a pivotal shift towards utilizing simple carbohydrate sugars as a major component of biogelator syn-thesis. By harnessing renewable energy and biobased materials, these gelators pave the way for environmentally responsible recovery of hydrocarbon technologies. A critical knowledge gap persists in the fundamental principles governing solvent-free, powder-phase gelation. Despite numerous reported biomolecular gelators, the field lacks a unified framework to explain why only a select few achieve rapid, solvent-free oil congelation. This review directly addresses this gap. We synthesize scattered evidence to establish that a synergistic interplay of non-covalent interactions, particularly the overlooked role of orbital overlaps like S–H/π, is a decisive factor for this functionality. Through an exploration of various bio-based PSOGs, this study highlights the crucial factors that have hindered their widespread application. The research uncovers the fundamental principles that must be addressed to unlock the full potential of supra-molecular bio-based gelators, in an attempt to advance our current understanding of these gelation processes for developing greener methods for hydrocarbon recovery.