Bioremediation of oil spills

Abstract

Due to the increasing demand of petroleum everywhere, and the great amount of spills, accidents and disasters, there is an urgent need to find an effective, non-cost and harmless method to clean up the affected areas. There are microorganisms in nature (bacteria and fungi, mainly) that feed on hydrocarbons and transform them into others harmless chemical substances. These bacteria produce enzymes that degrade oil very effectively. This natural process can be accelerated by adding more bacteria or providing nutrients and oxygen to facilitate their growth, which is called ―bioaugmentation and biostimulation. Through this project we discover that these processes can be affected by different factors making difficult the biodegradation execution and opening a gap between the laboratory experiments and the real cases. Therefore, there is much remain to be done and a lot of study ahead to make this technique available in a great scale.