Crude crunching: Rod-shaped Oceanospirillales bacteria feed on a droplet of crude oil in this sample from a deep oil plume near BP's spill. The bacteria was collected by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
Science/AAAS
Microbes may have eaten away at BP's oil in deep water; now the marshland needs help.
Microbes may become the heroes of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by gobbling up oil more rapidly than anyone expected. Now some experts suggest we ought to artificially stimulate such microbes in stricken marshland areas to aid their cleanup.
Evidence published this week shows that deep-water microbes in the Gulf may be rapidly chewing up BP's spilled crude. This could sway federal authorities to use petroleum-digesting microbes or fertilizer additives that can stimulate naturally occurring bacteria for future spills. Such measures were originally rejected for the BP spill.
Ralph Portier, a marine toxicologist at Louisiana State University, says the EPA approves of such measures in general, but they weren't approved for the Gulf spill because it was thought they wouldn't be necessary--a presumption that now appears to be correct.
Oil has disappeared from the Gulf's surface waters since BP capped its blown-out well on August 15. Yet most of the estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil are unaccounted for. Some of BP's oil, however, has reached more than 100 miles of sensitive Gulf marsh, and may remain lodged deep within sediments for years.
Portier says cleanup authorities are following a 2001 federal position paper arguing that stimulating biodegradation was unnecessary in the Gulf ecosystem. The Gulf already harbors microbes adapted to degrading the region's naturally occurring underwater petroleum seeps, the federal paper said.
Microbial ecologist Terry Hazen, a bioremediation expert at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, says that this reasoning is correct for dispersed oil. Hazen led a team that identified a strain of microbes rapidly breaking down oil at a depth of 1,100 meters and icy temperatures as low as 5 °C--conditions where biodegradation is expected to proceed slowly. The research appears this week in the journal Science.
High crude prices, cheap natural gas, and U.S. demand boost heavy oil profits—and greenhouse gases.
But BP's "top kill" method to stanch the spill could also break it wide open.
The disaster exposes overreliance on blowout preventers that has been long disparaged by insiders.
I don't think this article is relevant, it can be one of bp strategies to confuse people and save some money on the clean up. This is not how studies are done. The fact that the oil is not on the surface doesn't mean that the bacteria eat it.
More than one science organization is calling bulldoody on this continuing propaganda that most of the oil has disappeared. Though the body of the article does in general couch its language more carefully and more objectively, admitting that much of the oil has not been accounted for, I would think that MIT technology review would wish to avoid a headlines that smacks of the propaganda that BP has been spewing as fast as the oil once spewed into the Gulf. One has to wonder what sort of endowments MIT has been receiving when provocative headlines such as this appear. In future Technology Review should show more restraint in writing these headlines if journalistic integrity and objectivity are to be retained.
So, when any research is reported that does not fit well with the anti-oil, anti-capitalist agenda of Green orthodoxy, then that research is to be labeled suspect, tainted, or propaganda? And the reportage of such research condemned as something akin to sleeping with the enemy? Isn't it at least possible that the ecology of the GoM, which somehow manages to digest a steady and considerable diet of naturally seeping petroleum (and has done so for eons without the assistance of tree-hugging twits), just might have gobbled up most of the spill? Or does the unbridled rage against BP just make dispassionate inquiry impossible? Just askin'....
It can reasonably be construed as propaganda to suggest at this point, as BP and government agencies seem to have, that the lack of petroleum on the surface indicates that microbes have quite likely already consumed a large percentage, particularly before all the anecdotal reports of nighttime, secretive applications of the toxic dispersants (which may be occurring to sink the oil (out of sight, out of mind)) are refuted or explained. It's way too early to start declaring victory regarding the environmental effects, if one is pretending to be objective.
OK but say for the sake of argument that the bugs have eaten the oil. Every !00 tons of crude simply becomes 100 tons of something else. My question is what?
Probably something obnoxious, smelly and toxic
So you say the missing oil is still there. Sounds like President Bush insisting the Iraqi's have a nuclear bomb program. I think you are obligated to fund the search and find the missing oil rather than speculate.
Everything I hear from my coast guard contacts is that Allen is a straight shooter. I'd trust him to confirm the story.
I can't believe that the commenters seem unhappy to hear of the relatively rapid bacterial degradation occurring in the Gulf of Mexico. Bacterial degradation of petroleum is one of the best-established remediation methods around petroleum leaks or spills in groundwater, surface water, and soil. A 6-day half-life is completely credible in open water. And the lack of an ongoing oil slick at the gulf's surface, where temperature is higher and degradation faster, is also not unexpected. As stated in the article, degradation is much slower in the wetland sediments that were inundated, but even there, observations like those reported in the article are useful in determining how to proceed with cleanup.
All this bad news about the oil spill in the gulf and it just keeps coming. So I put my pencil to it on my own. It just didn’t seem to add up. Well here is what I found out.
The spill was about 4 times the size of the Exxon Valdez at 235,000 cubic meters of oil times four or 940,000 total cubic meters.
The well is forty miles out into the gulf in 5280 ft of water.
If you put the well in the center of 640 acres of sea floor (one section) and made a wall to the surface around the perimeter you would have one cubic mile of water.
Guess how many loaded shipments of oil on the Exxon Valdez it would take to fill the cubic mile. Would you guess ten? One hundred? Or one thousand?
I bet you wouldn’t guess 17,737 loads. But yes, that is what it would take. And that would be only one of the 600,000 cubic miles of water in the gulf
Why don’t the news media tell us that? No wonder it’s so hard to find the oil.
Could it be it would ruin their story?
"rod-shaped bacteria feasting on the 10- to 60-micrometer droplets fast enough to halve the oil every two to six days"
I'm no bacteria expert, but if these little critters got injected into the well itself, would they feed on the oil in the undersea dome itself till the food source was used up? Would they digest coal too?
Also - what is the by product left over?
It is not enough to say that this is propaganda by BP, without any proof. It's an assumption... not science.
Oil floats, even when broken down.. Check out the foam one sees in a hot tub. In vitro tests support the thesis. But we should be looking at this and trying to find it, so before then, don't make assumptions.
Why not do an experiment of the oil laden vegetation? A control, bugs only, and bugs plus dispersants. Sounds simple enough. We have the rod shape bacteria… all we need is growing vegetation, oil, bugs and dispersant. Could be done simply in any micro lab.
ron hansing 9.13.10
I thought the article was useful and did not attempt to overstate the results. Evidence was reported, indicating that microbes are probably playing a significant role in destroying some of the leaked oil, but questions remain - like how much oil is still out there. I didn't sense any agenda being promoted in the article itself, or by the quoted researchers, other than trying to understand what is happening in the Gulf and speculating on how environmental damage may be mitigated.
Some of the comments, however, show an ideological bias, e.g., "oil companies are bad; offshore drilling is bad, therefore we don't want to hear about results that may cause a revision downward in the damage estimates". When the oil was still pouring into the Gulf, we saw a similar bias (but in the opposite direction) from BP and others who wished to downplay the magnitude of the oil spill. Perhaps that is what some of the commenters are reacting to - they have an ideological hangover from listening to oil industry apologists. Whatever the slant, this type of bias is, of course, part of our human nature and I expect we all suffer from it. Since, we need real solutions to real problems, it's in our collective best interest to try and minimize our idological biases. On environmental and energy issues, we are not doing too well.
By the way, does anyone know how much oil enters the Gulf ecosystem annually from various sources (offshore drilling, other anthropogenic causes, and natural causes) and what work has been done to understand its fate, e.g., microbial or other environmental degradation? Knowing this would help put the current research in context.
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22 Comments
The Great Vanishing Oil Spill
Glad nature had a failsafe mechanism cause BP sure didn't.
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