Petroleum Spill Bioremediation in Marine Environments

Abstract

Bioremediation is a promising technology for responding to marine oil spills. A majority of molecules in crude oils and refined products are biodegradable, and they will eventually leave the environment as they are consumed by microbes. Bioremediation aims to stimulate the rate of this process. Successful bioremediation efforts have so far focused on applying fertilizers to aerobic oiled shorelines to at least partially relieve the nitrogen limitation of biodegradation by indigenous microorganisms. Nevertheless, there seems to be room for improving the process by developing better fertilizers, developing surfactants to stimulate degradation, and perhaps using exogenous bacteria. There also is room to extend the application to oiled marshes and other anaerobic sediments, and perhaps to floating slicks. This review covers our present understanding of hydrocarbon degradation in the marine environment, and discusses field trials and field use of bioremediation as an important adjunct to other tools for responding to marine oil spills.

Preliminary Study on Biodegradation of Nigerian Natural Bitumen

“…Lepo and Cripe (1999) in their own findings showed that biodegradation ofPAHs was preferential to that ofn-alkanes in crude oil when they used some bacteria (Nocardia globerula, Rhodococcus fascians, Pseudomonas saccharophila). These findings contradicted the earlier view that the n -alkanes were generally considered the most biodegradable compound class within crude oil (Leahy and Colwell, 1990;Atlas and Bartha, 1992;Prince, 1993). The possible application of biodegradation in Antarctic was reported by Vasileva-Tonkova and Gesheva (2004), who isolated 17 microbes from Antarctic soil and all of them showed a good biodegradative potential for hydrocarbons.…”

Escravos light crude oil degrading potentials of axenic and mixed bacterial cultures

“…The bacteria isolated in this study have been reported by other workers (Ajisebutu and Alofe, 2004;Atlas and Cerniglia, 1995;Igbinosa et al, 2007;Jennings and Tanner, 2000;Okoh et al, 1999Okoh et al, , 2001Prince, 1993). The pseudomonads were predominantly isolated on the ELCO-BSM agar plates (5 out of 11 isolates).…”

Biodegradation of crude petroleum oil and environmental pollutants by Candida tropicalis strain

“…The utilization abilities of fungi to different hydrocarbons showed significant differences (Elshafie et al, 2007). Prince (1993) reported that microorganisms show a distinct preference for some hydrocarbons over other. Cl was preferred and the other inorganic and/or organic nitrogen sources repressed the biodegradation activity.…”