Oil-eating bacteria to clean up spills
by TreeHugger on 05.19.05
I'm sure nobody here has to be convinced that oil spills are bad things. Cleaning them up is arduous and always a compromise between various unsatisfactory methods; when scientists tell us that the cleanest way to get rid of the oil is to burn it, and often you can't even do that, it's clearly not ideal. But there's hope on the horizon!
I have to admit that a few things in this Science Daily article went over my head for lack of a complete scientific training, but in essence it seems to be saying that according to a paper published in Enviromental Microbiology (not quite my bedtime reading), an indigenous microbiota of the Galician shore (northwest Spain, south of the Bay of Biscay, north of Portugal) is able to degrade crude oil and could be used on spills. Somewhat ironically, it's possible that this oil-eating bacteria is present in that region because of past contamination, which would have made "indigenous populations evolve to select for organisms able to grow and degrade components of crude oil." Lets hope it turns out to work well on large scale oil spills. ::A Hope For Oil Spill Bioremediation
[by MGR]
Stories this like seem to crop up several times a year, inevietably from some univesity lab fishing for industry grants. Its been this way for decades. Bottom line is that material handling issues overwhelm and they never get implemented past the bench scale level. What are the odds for example that there'ed be enough culture waiting in a warehouse ready to be shipped off the the next disaster? Better way is to reduce dependency on oveseas oil, reducing the odds of spills happening.
There is a bacteria that eats oil already teh broblem is that it eats all oil and lots of other fatty molecules liek say fat in plants and animals. This oil is very important to all life as it makes up mostly cell walls and what not. Lets not go around moving bacteria around to places they do not belon as we may get the same situation with non-indeginous bacteria as with frogs in Australia and intrusive non-local plants everywhere in the world.
Bioremediation is an interesting field, and John is right, the focus tends to be on cleaning up toxic environments because that is where scientists can drum up grant money. However, as molecular biology advances, and more basic research continues into the ‘normal’ microbial flora of environments, I expect we will find a bacteria that can take advantage of any environment, and turn a waste product into its component molecules. This is probably one of those fields we will see play a large role in the future. In fact I think it’s not too far in the future that we will begin to find useful bacteria for our car engines or computer systems (dust bunny killers for example).
Sure, it sounds great...until someone drops these things into the Saudi oil fields.
http://www.bio-sol.co.uk/oil-sponge.html
Found this truly remarkable product some months ago, and I think it's a great thing to deploy NOW, whether or not there's problems with bacteria. If isolating what they eat is a problem, these sponges would do a lot of that by default, picking up only what's loose in the environment as opposed to a massive wash of the microbes.