Can Oil-Eating Bacteria Help Clean Up the Gulf Oil Spill?

sciencehabit writes "At this point it's unclear how much of an environmental threat oil spreading from the BP spill will cause, but the federal government is mobilizing thousands of workers to prepare for the worst. They have a potential ally: microbes that have evolved an ability to break down oil that seeps from the ocean bottom. It gets devoured by a variety of bacteria, which eat it by chemically transforming its compounds into useful cellular constituents." Wired has some pictures of the spill from orbiting satellites.

Comments

Poop

[Donoho]

I'd say it depends on what they poop.

Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans always have good luck introducing a new species into an untested environment. *popcorn*

Re:Of course

[FooAtWFU]

It would be difficult, if not impossible, for it be much worse than introducing a few million gallons of crude oil into the same environment.

Re:Of course

[tool462]

We, as a species, have a record of doing the difficult, if not impossible, and often by accident. I, too, would like some of the AC's popcorn.

Re:Of course

[buchner.johannes]

so you choose the famous last words "can't get worse, right?"

Re:Of course

[DarkOx]

I am not sure you can just make that statement. You are going to have a few million gallons of putrefying bacteria in that same environment when the food runs out. That could be plenty unpleasant. When its all said and done that bacteria may or may not have turned the oil into something more easily metabolized by other flora and fonna that was already there. You will then have subsequent explosions in some populations and declines in others. The entire ecology could be way out of balance for a very long time. The oil we know will kill a great deal of the things we care about; but past spills tell us enough will survive that eventually there will be recovery. The bacteria might do any number of things.

Re:Of course

[interkin3tic]

Humans always have good luck introducing a new species into an untested environment

Sounds like these bacteria are already in the ocean, eating naturally occouring oil leaking out of the earth. I suspect that the reason you don't find these bacteria already out there in the gulf of mexico would be that their food usually ISN'T there, not that these or similar bacteria haven't ever been introduced there.

Having said that, it takes remarkable arrogance to suggest testing that theory on a massive scale. Who are these people using the environment as a lab anyway... oh right, it's the oil company that dumped it there in the first place, one of the ones trying to convince us to continue testing climate change theories.

Anyway, look at the title of the article. "Can we save the beaches." Pretty clear the focus here is on keeping the problem from getting into people's backyards, people who will then sue. The focus is -not- on preventing any further harm in the gulf.

Re:Why so serious?

[BBTaeKwonDo]

Drill, baby, drill!

Timescales, timescales...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Obviously, over a sufficiently long time, all but the nastiest flavors of hydrocarbon are subject to biological attack(which, among other reasons, is why there isn't much free oil just sitting around on the earth's surface, and what is close to the surface has mostly degraded into a hardened mass of tar).

However, if anybody thinks that bacteria that evolved to metabolize oil seeps are going to be able to eat the output of a more or less uncapped modern production well before it floats and oils a whole lot of birds/beach/furry animals, they are dreaming.

There are practically no complex organic compounds that are truly persistent, between UV and adventurous microbes; but there are plenty that are persistent enough that you'll be dead by the time they've worked themselves out.

Re:Timescales, timescales...

[Bigjeff5]

Microbes survive everywhere, there is almost certainly a type that can survive on the ocean's surface and metabolize the oil. I have no idea for sure, but it's almost a given, with microbes.

Last estimate I heard was three months to cap the well.

Re:Timescales, timescales...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Heavy metals are a special nuisance because its the atom, not the molecule, that is of concern. There are a lot of ghastly poisons and unpleasant pollutants that turn into a mixture of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and maybe a dash of phosphorus, nitrogen, an whatnot, if you burn them hard enough, or if some clever bacterium gets to them. Heavy metals aren't one of them.

Barring the development of a bacterium clever enough to catalyze nuclear fission, though, heavy metals aren't going anywhere. Best case scenario, they are(either through organic or inorganic processes) converted into relatively biologically inactive forms, and get incorporated into sediments and just sort of sit there. Worst case, they remain in highly bioavailable forms and float around the food chain wreaking havoc of various flavors.

I'm not an expert; but my understanding is that bacteria and other organisms can cut both ways on this. Some(either by happenstance, or as an evolved measure to protect their own biological systems) have chemical means of binding heavy metals into relatively inoffensive molecules. Others make things worse(from our perspective). There are a number of types of bacteria that can convert mercury(hardly salubrious; but less offensive than its reputation would suggest) into methylmercury(substantially nastier).

this might be a dumb question but...

[JustNiz]

I bet the little guys can't each much more than their own body weight in oil per day. Have you seen how big the oil slick is? who the heck has that much oil-eating bacteria ready to go?

Re:this might be a dumb question but...

[pspahn]

Wait wait wait... what kind of techniques do they use in the lab?

A little Richard Simmons, some psychoactive mushrooms, and a shot of mGH should hasten the pace a little, don't you think?

Pimp My Disaster

[MarcQuadra]

Listen, I don't want to get crucified for this, but I did the math yesterday. 5,000 barrels a day sounds like a lot, but this spill only adds about 45% to the total daily runoff coming out of the Mississippi anyway. If this gets plugged in 30 days, the total increase in annual oil going into this 'neighborhood' will be about 4%.

Again, I'm not defending the spill, it needs to get plugged, but this isn't going to dramatically change the situation in that area of the Gulf, mostly because the Gulf is such a mess already.

Re:Pimp My Disaster

[seifried]

But this is a relatively concentrated spill as compared to the runoff from the Mississippi river. Most things aren't a problem if sufficiently diluted ("the solution to pollution is dilution" as the old saying goes, put it up a smoke stack or into a river and it's all good). This is concentrated sufficiently to cause real problems.

Re:Pimp My Disaster

[MartinSchou]

Listen, I don't want to get crucified for this, but I did the math yesterday. 5,000 barrels a day sounds like a lot, but this spill only adds about 45% to the total daily runoff coming out of the Mississippi anyway.

Not entirely sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that the Mississippi 'leaks' 11,000 barrels of crude oil into the Mexican Gulf a day?

I did my own math on that. The river has an average discharge of 12,743 m^3/s. One barrel of oil is 0.158'987'3 m^3. 11,000 barrels a day equals 0.020'241'438'7 m^3/s, which is 1.6 * 10^-4%. Granted, that's really not a lot, but at 83 dollars a barrel, it does sound rather odd if the oil companies would be willing to let almost a million dollars a day just drift away

The problem with oil though, isn't so much that there's a lot of it, because in this case, there really isn't. It's just under 800 m^3 a day, and the Gulf of Mexico is a huge body of water. But oil floats, it sticks to things (like birds and mammals), it makes anything that has been in contact with it inedible for humans and our feed stock. This means we can't use any of the fish that have been in contact with oil for anything. We can't eat them and we can't feed them to our livestock. I doubt they could even be used as a fertilizer. It's probably lethal for any kind of fish anyway, as it tends to clog up their gills. And just to make it a bit more tricky, it reduces the amount of sunlight that can be used by algae - i.e. it ruins the entire bottom of the food chain.

But again, we're only talking 800 m^3 a day. But oil doesn't lump together until it has become tar. Until then it tends to lay in the upper 0.002 mm of the water table (given enough room, which is clearly available in the Gulf) when it's really thick. So now we're looking at 800 m^3 but only 0.002 mm deep. This gives us an area of 400 km^2.

So, each day we're covering a 400 km^2 (154 miles^2) with a relatively thick layer of oil every single day. This has been going on since April 20th. That's 20 days, so 4,000 km^2 which is the same size as Rhode Island.

And just to make it a bit more fun ... it's not just an oil slick the size of Rhode Island drifting towards the Gulf coast. No. They've been trying to set it on fire, so now it's a wall of fire the size of Rhode Island drifting towards the Gulf coast.

Re:Pimp My Disaster

[welcher]

First, there isn't around 10000 barrels of oil coming out of the Mississippi every day in any sort of concentrated form. Second, 5000 barrels a day for 30 days is 150,000 barrels, comparable to the 250k barrels spilled by the Exxon Valdez. Finally, they've no idea how much oil is really coming out (the wsj says today possibly 25000 bpd are coming out) and BP says it will take between 55 and 90 days from now before they can attempt to plug it, even then it is only an attempt. So this is quite likely going to be the worst oil spill ever in the USA. I'd say it'll make quite a significant difference to quite a large area for quite a long time.

Kevin Anderson's "Ill Wind"

[wygit]

Did this plot

http://www.amazon.com/Ill-Wind-Kevin-J-Anderson/dp/0765357763/ref=tmm_mmp_title_0

"When a panicky oil company tries to clean up a major spill in San Francisco Bay by dropping genetically engineered oil-eating microbes on it, the little organisms go berserk and start devouring most of the world's long-chain polycarbons (gasoline, plastics, etc.). "

Dawn Dishwashing Liguid

[Low Ranked Craig]

The single-handedly saved the world from the Exxon spill. I saw it on TV so it must be true!

Containment

[Cyclloid]

What ever happened to those chains of floats used to encircle a spill and contain it? True, it is huge now but what about earlier when it could have been manageable?

Re:Containment

[Bigjeff5]

True, it is huge now but what about earlier when it could have been manageable?

You think that wasn't the very first thing they did after putting out the fire? There was no "earlier when it could have been manageable", the pipe broke off about 5-10 feet above the sea floor, which is well over a mile below sea level. Do you realize the kind of dispersion you get with that? It spreads out for tens of miles before it even hits the surface.

It's also an emulsion, which does not corral as well as oil sitting on top of water - an emulsion sits at the top, since there is oil in it, but not really on the top like pure oil does, since there is a lot of water in it too. They've got 30-40 miles of boom out there now to try and contain it and it isn't good enough to keep some of it from hitting the coast.

Re:Why so serious?

[demonlapin]

Stop giving money to nations that don't like us!

What's stupid about that? I happen to disagree with it - I'd rather use up the rest of the world's supplies of fossil fuels before exhausting our own - but it's neither patently stupid nor, as far as I can tell, a tea party slogan. "Drill, baby, drill" is over the top hyperbole, but it's also not a tea party slogan.

Re:Why so serious?

[PSandusky]

Accidents happen. You'd be as quick with the "Thanks BP" if it were an Exxon or Shell or whatever rig.

This is a catastrophe and all current rigs need to be fully inspected before another one happens (and it will).

The kicker, I think, is that the damn things weren't already up for these kinds of inspections long before now. It's a pipe, drilled into the seabed, with a metal/concrete structure extending above the surface of the water and holding the pipe upright. It's also in a hurricane zone. Saying that they need to be inspected now is nice and all, but it's nothing short of criminal that they weren't taken care of well before the spill happened. They could have been inspected, should have been inspected, and I will happily bet you dollars to donuts that what PM could have been done within BP's resources was not done at all.

So, yeah. Thanks, BP.

Re:Why so serious?

[Bigjeff5]

Those aren't just plain jane pipes stuck in the mud, they are loaded to the gills with failsafes. The other fail-safes worked (with regards to capping the well, anyway) but they were all topside on the rig, and so obviously they did no good when the rig burned down. The pipe eventually fell over with no rig to support it, creating the current break in the pipe.

There is actually a fail-safe sitting on the sea floor on this particular pipe just in case this exact situation. It operates a lot like some electronic/mechanical fail-safes where if the electrical connection is lost it triggers an unstoppable mechanical shutdown. The fail-safe in one this pipes require a certain amount of pressure flowing through the pipe, or it will hydraulically crimp the pipe closed. For some reason, it did never triggered, nobody yet knows why (my money is a pressure calculation mistake when setting up the tolerances).

What you can definitely blame BP for right now, without any new information, is not installing a remote trigger for this last-ditch fail-safe. It's my understanding that most drill rigs have a remote trigger, and the fact that this rig doesn't screams cut corners to save time. If they'd had one installed, they could have closed the leak by now, and it would be no big deal to wait another 3 months before it is actually capped.

Since this is BP's third major catastrophe in 5 years, I would not be surprised if they lose their license to operate.

Re:Why so serious?

[Bigjeff5]

What you can definitely blame BP for right now, without any new information, is not installing a remote trigger for this last-ditch fail-safe.

Actually, correcting myself here, but apparently it was Transocean that failed to install the remote trigger, since it's their rig and drilling equipment - BP just owns the well. So it's Transocean's fault for not putting in all the safety measures, and BP's fault for not verifying that said measures were all in place and working as expected.

Still, probably just another cost cutting situation, with BP not willing to spend the money to have their own guys check things out.

"Unclear?"

[Huntr]

At this point it's unclear how much of an environmental threat oil spreading from the BP spill will cause

Actually, it's pretty clear. This likely will go down as the worst environmental disaster in US history, in terms of its environmental and financial impacts. Estimates say it's leaking 1 million gal per day. That means we're just about at EVE already. It will take at least a few months to get another well drilled and this one capped.

In that time, LA and other Gulf oyster and shrimping fisheries are going away. That's $2.5-3 billion to LA per year. Coastal wetlands are going to be devastated - can't scrub the plants, have to burn the wetlands to clean it up. Hundreds of species of wildlife will be impacted. Their marine and estuarine habitats will be severely harmed. And we haven't even discussed the impact to beaches and Florida's $3 billion Gulf Coast tourism industry, yet. Hope the slick/tar balls don't hit the Loop current and end up in Miami Beach or even Daytona.

This is bad, folks.

Re:Why so serious?

[alaffin]

Actually, if I am not mistaken, said remote fail safe is not a requirement for drilling in the USA. That goes back to BP and a few of her large cousins in that oil and drilling industry (the remote fail safe is not required because they lobbied against it, suggesting it was unnecessary) but there's plenty of blame to go around on this one. In the end it will be BP that catches the most hell, and (depending on how you view it), rightly so - but it's important to note that there were a large number of screw-ups from top to bottom that created this situation.