Applications of Biosurfactants in the Petroleum Industry and the Remediation of Oil Spills

Abstract

Petroleum hydrocarbons are important energy resources. However, petroleum is also a major pollutant of the environment. Contamination by oil and oil products has caused serious harm, and increasing attention has been paid to the development and implementation of innovative technologies for the removal of these contaminants. Biosurfactants have been extensively used in the remediation of water and soil, as well as in the main stages of the oil production chain, such as extraction, transportation, and storage. This diversity of applications is mainly due to advantages such as biodegradability, low toxicity and better functionality under extreme conditions in comparison to synthetic counterparts. Moreover, biosurfactants can be obtained with the use of agro-industrial waste as substrate, which helps reduce overall production costs. The present review describes the potential applications of biosurfactants in the oil industry and the remediation of environmental pollution caused by oil spills.

Production and applications of lipopeptide biosurfactant for bioremediation and oil recovery by Bacillus subtilis CN2

“…The release of contaminants, such as petroleum and its byproducts, into the environment is one of the main causes of global pollution and has become a focus of great concern both in industrialized and developing countries due to the broad environmental distribution in soil, groundwater, and air [1]. The presence of different types of automobiles and machinery has resulted in an increase in the use of lubricating oil.…”

“…in which biosurfactant from Bacillus subtilis BS-37 recovered 96% of crude oil from oil-sand at the concentration of 300 mg L‾1 , surfactin (LB) and surfactin (G) solution. Joshi and Desai [64]reported 30.22-34.19% additional oil recovery over the water flood residual oil saturation using crude biosurfactant obtained from Bacillus strains by sand pack column studies.…”

Electric Field Driven Addressing of Oil-in-Water Droplets in the Presence of Gradients of Ionic and Nonionic Surfactants

“…(8). Surfactant enhanced remediation of oil spills [33] represents another possible application of the reported mechanism. We emphasize that the mechanism of droplet addressing described above is limited to the experimental systems in which the characteristic dimension of a droplet is much smaller than that of open fluidic chambers.…”

Review on Biosurfactant Production and its Application

“…Biosurfactants derived from microbes are classified according to their chemical composition and the microbial source, types of biosurfactants and respective producer microorganisms (Silva et al, 2014). Depending upon the mass the biosurfactant is divided into two groups the low mass biosurfactant includes glycolipid, phospholipid, lipopeptides, lipoproteins and fatty acids and the high mass biosurfactant includes polymeric and particulate surfactant.…”

“…Vesicles of Acinetobacter sp. comprises of protein, phospholipids and lipopolysaccharide (Krishnaswamy et al, 2008;Silva et al, 2014).…”