Oil eating bacteria may be better at cleaning up spills than people

[Leto]

After the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 there was a huge amount of oil released into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s simply no way to sugarcoat the news on that one… we lost a lot of oil into the water. A number of containment technologies were deployed, keeping much of the potential damage (though not all of it) in check. This included new chemical compounds which caused the oil to congeal and sink, rather than drifting ashore in vastly larger amounts than we saw. But puzzled environmentalists have returned to one intriguing question over and over again in the years since the spill: what happened to all the oil? Scientists have been scratching their heads trying to make the math work out for quite a while now because there was a lot more oil leaked out of the drill site than ever showed up on the beaches or was recovered from surface slicks. Sure, some of it was trapped in deeper ocean layers under thermal barriers, but much of it still seemed to be “missing” from the final calculations.

We now have a new suspect in this mystery and it’s nobody from Greenpeace or Exxon. There are tiny organisms in the ocean which seem to be capable of “eating” the oil in the water and cleaning up the ocean on their own. (AT&T Live News)

Perhaps these little bugs evolved to take advantage of the pol seeping up from the ocean floor for millions of years.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Perhaps these little bugs evolved to take advantage of the pol seeping up from the ocean floor for millions of years.

Please keep them out of our downhole reservoirs as I prefer we produce oil from them instead of gorged bugs.

Oceans will always handle things like this as they try to re-establish equilibrium.  People have always been amazed at massive spills from tankers, etc. in which not a trace of oil later can be found.

I recall a hurricane hitting the Gulf of Mexico while I was working in New Orleans.  It leveled several production facilities by taking out all piping, equipment and tanks full of oil.  No trace of the oil was ever found.  No trace of all that piping equipment or tankage was ever found either.

Like cleansing rain, a hurricane can reinvigorate and cleanse a lot.

[Suppressed]

Perhaps these little bugs evolved to take advantage of the pol seeping up from the ocean floor for millions of years.

Link to the original story?

One thing often overlooked is what fraction of the petroleum we're talking about.  A LOT of the light compounds escaped to the atmosphere or dissolved and drifted elsewhere, far from the spill location.  A lot of this was missed because people weren't looking for it at the time.

[thackney]

Link to the original story?

Reconstructing metabolic pathways of hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201657
Received: 11 December 2015
Accepted: 29 March 2016
Published online: 09 May 2016

The Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, one of the largest marine oil spills1, changed bacterial communities in the water column and sediment as they responded to complex hydrocarbon mixtures2,​3,​4. Shifts in community composition have been correlated to the microbial degradation and use of hydrocarbons2,5,6, but the full genetic potential and taxon-specific metabolisms of bacterial hydrocarbon degraders remain unresolved. Here, we have reconstructed draft genomes of marine bacteria enriched from sea surface and deep plume waters of the spill that assimilate alkane and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons during stable-isotope probing experiments, and we identify genes of hydrocarbon degradation pathways. Alkane degradation genes were ubiquitous in the assembled genomes. Marinobacter was enriched with n-hexadecane, and uncultured Alpha- and Gammaproteobacteria populations were enriched in the polycyclic-aromatic-hydrocarbon-degrading communities and contained a broad gene set for degrading phenanthrene and naphthalene. The repertoire of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon use varied among different bacterial taxa and the combined capabilities of the microbial community exceeded those of its individual components, indicating that the degradation of complex hydrocarbon mixtures requires the non-redundant capabilities of a complex oil-degrading community.

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Genetic potential of oil-eating bacteria from the BP oil spill decoded
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160509115556.htm
May 9, 2016

Microbiologists at The University of Texas at Austin and their colleagues have cracked the genetic code of how bacteria broke down oil to help clean up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, revealing that some bacteria have far greater potential for consuming oil than was previously known. The findings, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, have applications for responding to future oil spills and other ecological disasters, while shedding light on the ways in which tiny microbes played an outsized role in limiting damage from the 2010 spill caused by the explosion of a BP oil rig.....

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How an army of oil-eating bacteria can clean up the Gulf
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0510/How-an-army-of-oil-eating-bacteria-can-clean-up-the-Gulf
MAY 10, 2016

Some bacteria have serious oil-eating capabilities, say a team of researchers in their paper published Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology.

"This gives us an idea of who breaks down the oil and how they do it," author Nina Dombrowski, a postdoctoral researcher under co-author Brett Baker's lab at The University of Texas Marine Science Institute, tells The Christian Science Monitor. The team of researchers from UT, the University of North Carolina, and Heriot-Watt University analyzed bacterial species' relationships with oil in the context of BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "We are already naturally employing [the bacteria], nature is already doing it.... They can integrate it into their natural diet. Oil is a nutrient for them."

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Oil eating bacteria may be better at cleaning up spills than people
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/05/10/oil-eating-bacteria-may-be-better-at-cleaning-up-spills-than-people/
 MAY 10, 2016

After the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 there was a huge amount of oil released into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s simply no way to sugarcoat the news on that one… we lost a lot of oil into the water. A number of containment technologies were deployed, keeping much of the potential damage (though not all of it) in check. This included new chemical compounds which caused the oil to congeal and sink, rather than drifting ashore in vastly larger amounts than we saw. But puzzled environmentalists have returned to one intriguing question over and over again in the years since the spill: what happened to all the oil? Scientists have been scratching their heads trying to make the math work out for quite a while now because there was a lot more oil leaked out of the drill site than ever showed up on the beaches or was recovered from surface slicks. Sure, some of it was trapped in deeper ocean layers under thermal barriers, but much of it still seemed to be “missing” from the final calculations.

We now have a new suspect in this mystery and it’s nobody from Greenpeace or Exxon. There are tiny organisms in the ocean which seem to be capable of “eating” the oil in the water and cleaning up the ocean on their own. (AT&T Live News)

[Smokin Joe]

Perhaps these little bugs evolved to take advantage of the pol seeping up from the ocean floor for millions of years.

There always have been some bacteria which will consume oil. I think part of the problem is to be found in measuring the flow rates at the Macondo well. Initially, there was a string of pipe and the marine riser in the hole, kinked as they fell to the bottom. That doubtless restricted the actual production from the wellbore. The highest flows were later after the junk was cleared to try and get the cap over the well to capture oil from the cleared but failed BOP. Some 15000 to 25000 barrels of oil per day were recovered at the wellhead, for a total of 800,000 barrels of oil. The actual amount of oil in the water varies, but was adjudicated for the purpose of assessing fines.

FWIW, according to BP http://www.bp.com/en_us/bp-us/commitment-to-the-gulf-of-mexico/deepwater-horizon-accident/containing-the-leak.html

How much oil was spilled?

The volume of oil spilled into the Gulf was one of the issues in phase 2 of the multi-district litigation. In January 2015, the district court found that 3.19 million barrels of oil were discharged into the Gulf of Mexico and therefore subject to a Clean Water Act penalty. In addition, the court found that BP was not grossly negligent in its source control efforts.

That's a lot of oil, (multiply by 42 to get gallons if you want "media numbers", barrels is the industry standard measure) granted.


Encyclopedia Britannica's article:
http://www.britannica.com/event/Deepwater-Horizon-oil-spill-of-2010