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.

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: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.

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

[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.

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.). "

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.