With so many people demanding the government to ban Corexit, you may have also heard about the alternative solution proposed by so many environmental scientists: Bioremediation. It’s an interesting word and it sounds like such an evironmentally friendly solution, but lots of people are asking what the heck it is. Here’s our stab at answering your questions.

First things first. To hear certain groups tell it, the oil has to be dispersed in order to be manageable, and still others say that the oceans can absorb it. We’ve dedicated other posts to describing why the water and marine life cannot, in fact, “absorb” the Corexit. But here’s something you might not realize:

“It is important to remember that oil is a biological product and can be degraded by microbes, both on and beneath the surface of the water,” Hazen says. “Some of the detergents that are typically used to clean-up spill sites are more toxic than the oil itself, in which case it would be better to leave the site alone and allow microbes to do what they do best.”

Think about it. Oil is of the earth and the earth has a way of taking care of herself, even as badly as we sometimes treat her. If people would get out of the way nature would take care of herself.

This may be one of the most damning accounts I’ve read about the dispersants:

In 1978, an oil tanker, the Amoco Cadiz, split in two about three miles off the coast of Normandy, releasing about 227,000 tons heavy crude oil that ultimately stained nearly 200 miles of coastline. The spill-site was so large that only the areas of greatest economic impact were treated with detergents. Large areas in the more remote parts of the coast went untreated.

“The untreated coastal areas were fully recovered within five years of the Amoco Cadiz spill,” says Hazen. “As for the treated areas, ecological studies show that 30 years later, those areas still have not recovered.”

In March of 1989, the oil supertanker Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound and impacted some 1,300 miles of coastline. It remains the largest oil spill in U.S. history. A combination of detergents and bioremediation were used in the clean-up. The detergents were nutrient rich, being high in phosphorous and nitrogen compounds. In addition, as part of the bioremediation effort, fertilizers were also used to promote microbial growth. After the first year, the treated areas were dramatically cleaner, Hazen says, but after the second year no improvements were observed. Long-term prospects for the treated area are grim.

“What happened was that we took an oligotrophic (low nutrient) environment, and added lots of nutrients to it to speed up the degradation of the oil, which we probably did,” Hazen says. “However, we upset the ecological balance of the system, which could not handle the influx of nutrients. As a result, the severe environmental damage resulting from the spill is expected to persist for decades to come.”

While improvements to detergents have been made, including some degree of biodegradability, they remain nutrient rich and in some cases more toxic to the environment than crude oil.

“From a clean-up standpoint, right now we should be using sorbents to take up as much of the oil as possible,” Hazen says. “Then we need to gauge how quickly and completely this oil can be degraded without human intervention.”

So what about Bioremediation. Here’s an article that gives a nice primer:

Bioremediation allows natural processes to clean up harmful chemical compounds in the environment. Microscopic “bugs” or microbes that live in soil and groundwater like to eat certain elements (carbon typically), such as those found in gasoline and oil spills. When microbes completely digest these chemical compounds they change them into water and harmless gases such as carbon dioxide.

Bioremediation efforts have already been tested successfully since the recent gulf oil spill started:

Wetland clean-up crews often rely on a less invasive method, allowing indigenous microbes to digest the oil’s toxic compounds, says environmental scientist Ralph Portier, a colleague of Overton’s at LSU. In a 2006 spill in which oil leaked from tanks at a Louisiana refinery into nearby wetlands, this bioremediation method successfully lowered amounts of oil below hazardous levels within months, Portier says.

To coax microbes into growing faster, crews will often spray wetlands with dilute solutions of nitrate- and phosphate-based fertilizers. According to Portier, “It’s like watering your mom’s rose bushes.”

Portier and coworkers have run preliminary tests on the Gulf’s indigenous microbes’ ability to degrade this spill’s crude. In the experiments, the scientists filled crude-oil-coated flasks with ocean water teeming with the microbes and rocked the flasks to simulate wetland tides. The results have made Portier hopeful about the clean-up effort: Within three days, the oil had degraded so much that it collapsed off the flask walls. And, from feeding off the oil, the microbes had multiplied to a density of 106 cells per liter.

“If we can get those densities in the wetlands,” Portier says, “we’re going to get really dramatic reductions in oil.”

At LSU, folks! They know about this stuff in southern Louisiana! It’s certainly not as though the EPA is unaware of Bioremediation. They have given out grants for studies on this approach. Why is the EPA spending our tax dollars researching a solution that they will then not implement when we need it most? In one research grant from 2009 the US and Canadian governments handed out $3.2 million for studies on Bioremediation for use cleaning up bomb sites.

We’ll have more in coming days on Bioremdiation, but I hope this gives you enough of a primer to understand that we (by “we” I mean the EPA, but secondarily “we” as citizens not demanding more from the agency) are currently allowing BP, who has cut us open wide, to now stand there and openly pour acid into our wounds. From our cuts we can recover.  From the acid, we cannot.

Finally, because it’s so darned important, we’re reposting the below video showing these Bioremediation techniques successfully used in the first open sea application of oil-eating microbes to help clean up the mess from a tanker explosion off the coast of Texas.