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

A society without an attention span

[concealment]

Politics in a democracy involve two sides cheering for their own while doing anything they can to damage the other side.

Whenever a disaster happens, whichever side that named its underlying cause as an issue makes a huge deal of the event. To gain maximum publicity for their (righteous) cause, they overstates the event and style it as a new coming apocalypse.

Then months later when the consequence isn't as big as they thought, the event and the issue it represents pass out of public consciousness.

There's a nasty see-saw effect as a result. We're either full on an issue, or have forgotten it, and our legislators write law accordingly. It's like a society without an attention span.

Re:A society without an attention span

[postbigbang]

A narrow view.

The bacteria digested the oil, but what did they excrete. If they multiplied and now have no meal, they starve, and their carcasses in turn become something else. There was a process applied to the spilled oil by the bacteria. Is the remainder environmentally tenable? None of that seems to have been addressed.

No measurements have been made of long term effects as of yet, and so we don't know 1) quantity of remaining undigested oil 2) rate at which it can reasonably be digested 3) interim effects on ecosystems in the Gulf at this estimated rate 4) how much remaining oil there is to feed the equation 5) what current fishing rates do to the population, and what might replace the population given these rates, and more.

Democracy is weighing more than two sides of a question, as there are almost always more than two sides to a question. You're just used to American politics, which have devolved to become polarizing.

Re:A society without an attention span

[TubeSteak]

Politics in a democracy involve two sides cheering for their own while doing anything they can to damage the other side.

Whenever a disaster happens, whichever side that named its underlying cause as an issue makes a huge deal of the event. To gain maximum publicity for their (righteous) cause, they overstates the event and style it as a new coming apocalypse.

Your position ignores that sometimes there is an objectively "correct" thing to do and that sometimes, someone is objectively wrong for arguing against it.

Then months later when the consequence isn't as big as they thought, the event and the issue it represents pass out of public consciousness.

There's a nasty see-saw effect as a result. We're either full on an issue, or have forgotten it, and our legislators write law accordingly. It's like a society without an attention span.

Do you know why Nixon (that notorious liberal) created the EPA?
The second largest (deep water is #1) oil spill in American history brought so much attention to environmental issues that he had no choice.

That was 42 years ago. I wouldn't call 42 years "forgotten" or "see-saw effect" or "without an attention span."

Re:A society without an attention span

[navyjeff]

... That’s the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

We must destroy this bacteria.

[circletimessquare]

How dare they eat our precious, precious oil.

What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[divisionbyzero]

It's not like the oil just "goes away". It gets transformed into other materials. Are those hazardous? Is the Gulf now a giant cesspool of bacterial waste?

Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[artemis67]

More like a cycle of life... the oil spill is eaten by the bacteria, and then the bacteria get eaten by something else, which then gets eaten by something else.

I'm wondering what the fishing boats in the Gulf are seeing, if there was a corresponding explosion of growth in populations of shrimp or such.

Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[gstoddart]

It's not like the oil just "goes away". It gets transformed into other materials.

And, most importantly, long before the bacteria can do anything with it, the damage to the fish, coral, and everything else is done.

Though, I'm sure some people will say that since these bacteria will eventually clean things up we can spill and not worry about it.

Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[Yvanhoe]

It gets transformed into more bacteria and heat. And probably CO2 in the process.

Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[M. Baranczak]

I'm wondering what the fishing boats in the Gulf are seeing, if there was a corresponding explosion of growth in populations of shrimp or such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill#Fisheries

Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[khallow]

Is the Gulf now a giant cesspool of bacterial waste?

It's worth remembering that the Gulf, as well as most of the rest of the world, has always been a giant cesspool of bacterial waste.

Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[mapkinase]

In principal, chemically, all of oil could be processed, with potential release/consumption of water and carbon dioxide.

In terms of elements, chemically, oil actually is pretty clean, it's just basic organic elements of life, as every one of you knows. Oil pollution problem is a result it's physical properties: viscosity, density, etc. Which results from oil being bunch of rather long polymers.

Theoretically, it does not make sense for bacteria that consumes oil to produce polymers longer than oil polymers, most likely, it couldn't exert nothing but carbon dioxide, water, methane - smaller molecular compounds.

That's the bacterial waste directly from oil metabolism. Theoretically there could be toxins from other aspects of bacteria's life.

Theoretically.

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:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce?

[Solandri]

and it takes a tuna fish 5-15 years to mature,

I'm an avid fisherman and amateur ichthyologist. Tuna mature in 3-5 years. The average lifespan of most tuna species is estimated to be about 8-15 years old. Counting the rings in the otoliths (ear bones) showed world record yellowfin tuna in the 400 lb range to be about 13-15 years old. The vast majority of yellowfin, bigeye, and bluefin tuna (the bigger ones) harvested commercially are in the 50-150 pound range (roughly 4-7 years). The older ones build up too much mercury (thanks to everyone who blocks nuclear so we can continue burning coal) and are legally only usable as pet food. Except for the Japanese who don't seem to care when it comes to raw bluefin tuna.

And dispersant is soap. Yeah some formulations are more toxic than others - boaters are encouraged to use biodegradable marine soaps at sea. But they're not all some potent chemical cocktail which will cause life to wither and die on contact. It's soap.

Re:Where have all the Chicken Littles gone?

[MyLongNickName]

Still an estimated 40% of the oil and natural gas from the spill is still in the Gulf today.

Read that. Basically, you seem like you'd be happy if I served you a glass of my piss, but before I served it to you I removed 60% of the piss and replaced it with pure water.

Some of us are not "enviro-wacko"s, but are not comfortable with self-regulating companies. We learned from the pre 1920's when corporations ran rampant. We learned from the period before 1970 or 1980 when companies polluted without consequences. I want progress. I want oil drilling. I don't want a blank check for BP and others to pollute or shortcut on safety.

It happens again and again in nature

[Orga]

This could easily have been a natural occurrence, at anytime nature could again just decide to expel tons of deep ocean oil, but because now people have $$$$ involved and it could be blamned on someone (sued) then it's all the news with the environmentalists. Anyone who actually has studied some Geology knows this was not a big deal for the environment... and please.. we need to talk in scales of centuries.. not months.

Re:It happens again and again in nature

[Chalnoth]

Sorry, but this, "It's a natural phenomenon!" argument just does not fly. A really, really simple way to see why this argument cannot be remotely reasonable is to look at pictures like the one posted on this article:
http://www.allword-news.co.uk/tag/louisiana-fish-deaths-raise-oil-spill-questions/

But to get into the nitty gritty of it, the article you linked says that it's "twice the Exxon Valdez spill each year," and that is likely spread out over a wide area and released in small amounts that are less likely to clump. Also, consider the magnitude: the Exxon Valdez spill between 260,000 and 750,000 barrels of oil. So if we take the high estimate, that's perhaps 1.5 million barrels of oil that normally spill into the Gulf of Mexico each year, likely spread over a wide area.

The Deepwater Horizon spill was around 4.9 million barrels of oil, all released in a short time (much less than a year), all in the same place. No, spills of this magnitude do not happen naturally (except perhaps in exceedingly rare circumstances). Yes, it is highly damaging to the ecosystem of parts of the Gulf.

Re:It happens again and again in nature

[Orga]

There are four regions offshore North America with known seeps. Two of these, the Gulf of Mexico and southern California, have a combined annual oil seep rate of 160,000 tonnes, derived by adding 140,000 tonnes, estimated from the Gulf of Mexico, and the estimate of 20,000 tonnes from Southern California.

source: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10388&page=192

Spills of that magnitude at one location might be rare but they still occur and looking at time in a geologic timescale they're simply not that big of a deal. Man has simply decided that it needs to feed of the seafood in that area, and swim on those beaches so a spill is something to complain about. A meteor impact wiping out 80% of all species on the planet you could deem damaging to the ecosystem, it's still a natural occurence, life still finds a way and the world still turns.

The pictures of dead fish sure prompt a lot of people to get upset I'm sure but it does not make this event even remotely unprecedented in nature.

Re:It happens again and again in nature

[wvmarle]

They may say "twice the Exxon Valdez in a year" which may very well be true, but there are two giant differences:

1) both the Exxon Valdez and this Deep Water Horizon spills spilled their vast quantities of oil in hours or days, not spread over a year. They both caused a huge spike in oil concentrations, well over the naturally occuring spills.

2) the Exxon Valdez was at the surface, so the oil directly contaminated large parts of shoreline where the natural seep usually doesn't get to as it's all eaten by bacteria or dissolved in the water before it can reach the shore.

The reason there are natural spills all the time will certainly have helped in the clean-up of the Deep Water Horizon spill, as there is an existing ecosystem of oil-eating bacteria present. But to say "oh it doesn't matter as nature spills more" is false. Nature has a huge capacity when it comes to cleaning up our mess, given enough time, but that doesn't mean we should just allow it to happen.

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?

Re:It happens again and again in nature

[h4rr4r]

I won't live for centuries, will you?

I want to be able to eat fish today, fisherman want to be able to make a living today. The question was never will the sea recover, it was what is the economic cost of the spill. Also what is the short term cost to the local environment?

Re:It happens again and again in nature

[MattskEE]

Even though oil does seep into the ocean naturally in some locations, human-caused oil spills are still bad news. Life will find a way, eventually, but in the meantime there is significant damage to the local ecosystem which was caused by humans, and resulting damage to human livelihoods. Even if you don't care about the ecological damage for its own sake do you not sympathize with the damage to human livelihoods?

To compare it to another scenario: floods sometimes happen naturally, but are sometimes caused by dams bursting, maybe due to human negligence. Does the fact that it can happen naturally make it okay if a burst dam destroys a town?

Re:It happens again and again in nature

[Uberbah]

The pictures of dead fish sure prompt a lot of people to get upset I'm sure but it does not make this event even remotely unprecedented in nature.

Drivel. The largest spill in history is by definition unprecedented. And of course the problem with pointing to previous natural disasters that lead to extinction events for "comparison" is the, you know, extinction event that followed.

I miss BadAnalogyGuy...

[Anonymous Coward]

just as much as you do, but this is ridiculous:

Read that. Basically, you seem like you'd be happy if I served you a glass of my piss, but before I served it to you I removed 60% of the piss and replaced it with pure water.

More like: 60% of the pee Michael Phelps put in the pool during the Olympics has been filtered out. Fancy a swim?

Re:I miss BadAnalogyGuy...

[wvmarle]

Pee is mostly water, containing a small fraction of contaminants.

Oil on the other hand, is 100% concentrated contaminant.

Can't compare the two so easily.

Re:Apparently there's still a leak

[danbert8]

Or they could be naturally occurring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep

Re:Conversion process?

[Chalnoth]

From what little I know of biology, I'm almost certain they're used for fuel, meaning eventually broken down into a combination of H2O and CO2. There may be a few steps along the way, where the bacteria incorporate some of the hydrocarbons in their membranes for a short time, or break the longer hydrocarbon chains into shorter chains, releasing the smaller molecules back into the water for other bacteria to gobble up. But eventually it's basically all going to become H2O and CO2.

But what happens to it?

[hawguy]

What happens to all of the oil they consume? When a person devours a large plate of nachos, much of that tasty food comes out as undesirable waste products that have to be carefully treated and disposed of.

Do they turn it into some other chemical? Do they just eat the oil, reproduce, and eventually die, leaving 200,000 tons of organic matter at the bottom of the gulf (is that any better than 200,000 tons of oil?). Oil from the ground has lots of contaminants like sulfur, what happens to the parts of the oil the bacteria can't digest?

Re:A drop in the bucket, comparably

[hawguy]

If one barrel is 306 pounds and a ton is 2000 pounds then that's 400,000 pounds of oil consumed, or 1324 barrels. In contrast, BP trashed the Gulf with an estimated 5 million barrels.

It's interesting that bacteria are working hard to consume the spilled oil, but hardly a successful method of cleanup.

I don't know how you arrived at "400,000 lbs" from 200,000 tons, but I came up about 1.3M barrels of oil:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200000+tons++%2F+307+lbs%2Fbarrel

Which is still only about 25% of the spill, yet the article said that it accounts for 40% of the oil, what happened to the rest?

Re:Where have all the Chicken Littles gone?

[khallow]

Pretty sure buying off regulators is self-regulation.

Now all you need to do is get the rest of us to agree with you. My view is that heavy regulation doesn't become self-regulation merely because society fails to enforce it. It just becomes unenforced regulation.

While the two look similar functionally, it's worth remembering that solutions to the problems are different. If self-regulation doesn't work, then one can apply a fix merely by adding regulation that addresses the deficiencies. (Of course, you might create new problems by doing so. Just pointing how the process works.)

If regulation is unenforced, then it doesn't matter how much you add, it'll still be unenforced. So it is possible in such a case to end up with both heavy regulation and an industry that would disappear, if that regulation were ever enforced according to the letter of the law. (some industries, say the assassination industry, aren't worth having, but most such industries have benefit as well as cost, and would still exist in a reasonable regulation environment.)

Another problem is that regulation can be selectively unenforced. That allows certain companies to enjoy state-granted competitive advantages. Self-regulation doesn't create such opportunities. But it does have the disadvantage of the prisoners' dilemma. Namely, that businesses which voluntarily sacrifice in certain ways can be taken advantage of by businesses that do not.

Re:Where have all the Chicken Littles gone?

[khallow]

Another issue is that unenforced regulation can still end up with society paying for a bunch of regulators. It's just regulators that aren't for whatever reason doing their jobs. Self-regulation doesn't have this diversion of resources.

So are they revising this report....

[oh_my_080980980]

After the recent tar balls and oil patched brought to shore by Hurricane Isaac....

Re:Where have all the Chicken Littles gone?

[roccomaglio]

The actual text from the article. "Our results suggest that some (about 40%) of the released hydrocarbons that once populated these layers still remained in the Gulf post September 2010, so food was available for the feast to continue at some later time. But the location of those substances and whether they were biochemically transformed is unknown." This does not seem to be exactly what you are quoting.

Re:Where have all the Chicken Littles gone?

[HornWumpus]

Don't forget the cost of misregulation.

Like required Freddy and Fanny to buy junk mortgages on the secondary market.

When regulators have political axes to grind the regulations can be astoundingly expensive.

Re:Where have all the Chicken Littles gone?

[MightyMartian]

What's needed is guns to the heads of the CEOs, Boards of Directors and top shareholders, with a promise that if such spills are not completely resolved in five years entirely at the company's cost, most assuredly the triggers will be pulled.

I doubt you would need any more regulation than that.