In this work, a method for washing sand contaminated by petroleum is described. It consists in extracting the pollutant from the soil grains using fresh water without any chemicals. Two sets of experiments were conducted: at small scale using test tubes and at large scale using one fluidizing column. Experiments with test tubes were performed in batch mode using dune sand of 312 µm mean diameter artificially contaminated with petroleum at an amount of 10% based on clean sand weight. The study of the effect of many operating parameters on decontamination efficiency has shown that water temperature and agitation intensity exerts remarkable effects. On the contrary, initial contaminant concentration and treatment duration exerts just little effects. Experiments using fluidising column were performed using the same contaminated sand in continuous mode. Sand grains were fluidised by ordinary water at a sufficiently low velocity to avoid any entrainment. Temperature was kept at 50 °C. Results showed that fluidisation is an efficient technique in view of high yield of petroleum recovery (up to 65% in mass). The absence of any chemical additive to water makes this operation both cheap and ecological.