Around 200,000 Tons of Deep Water Horizon Oil and Gas Consumed By Bacteria

SchrodingerZ writes "The University of Rochester and Texas A&M University have determined that in the five months following the Deepwater Horizon Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, bacteria have consumed over 200,000 tons of oil and natural gas. The researched was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (abstract). 'A significant amount of the oil and gas that was released was retained within the ocean water more than one-half mile below the sea surface. It appears that the hydrocarbon-eating bacteria did a good job of removing the majority of the material that was retained in these layers," said co-author John Kessler of the University of Rochester.' The paper debuts for the first time 'the rate at which the bacteria ate the oil and gas changed as this disaster progressed, information that is fundamental to understanding both this spill and predicting the behavior of future spills.' It was also noted that the oil and gas consumption rate was correlated with the addition of dispersants at the wellhead (video). Still, an estimated 40% of the oil and natural gas from the spill remains in the Gulf today."

Comments

Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[nahdude812]

The money quote from that article regarding whether there is a corresponding explosion of population of life that feeds on this bacteria:

In late 2012 local fishermen report that crab, shrimp, and oyster fishing operations have not yet recovered from the oil spill and many fear that the Gulf seafood industry will never recover. One Mississippi shrimper who was interviewed said he used to get 8,000 pounds of shrimp in four days, but this year he got only 800 pounds a week. Mississippi's oyster reefs have been closed since the spill started. A Louisanna fisherman said the local oyster industry might do 35 per cent this year, "If we're very lucky." Dr Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer and a marine and oyster biologist, said that many of the Gulf fisheries have collapsed and "If it takes too long for them to come back, the fishing industry won't survive".[314]

So... no. If I had to speculate, the bacteria is most effective in high concentrations of dispersant. That dispersant is likely detrimental to higher lifeforms, so it's probably a smorgasbord of poisoned food. A shrimper who pulls in around 6% of his pre-disaster haul, that sounds like a completely devastated ecology. Also from the above article, they used dispersants right as tuna were spawning, and it takes a tuna fish 5-15 years to mature, so the effects of that might not hit the tuna fishing industry for 3 more years.

Re:It happens again and again in nature

[nahdude812]

Your article states that twice an Exxon Valdez seeps into the gulf naturally each year. Their methodology is pretty suspect - measuring the thickness of naturally occurring oil on the surface, extrapolating the expected bacterial consumption rate and natural churn rate, and multiplying this by the surface area of the gulf. But I'll accept their figures for the sake of argument. So that's 84,000 m^3. Deepwater Horizon was 780,000 m^3, 18.6 times larger.

You're saying that releasing 18 times that volume over the course of only a few months in a single location about 40 miles from a coast probably doesn't have much if any measurable ecological impact? Maybe Exxon Valdez was no big deal either, I mean that's the Pacific Ocean, I'm sure there are hundreds of times that much oil seeping naturally into the ocean, right?