Vol.5 No.4 – 1: Bioremediation Protocols of Hydrocarbon Contamination: A critical Appraisal of a Case Study of Soil Contamination

By: Yousef Albalawi¹, Furat Al-Faraj²

¹Environmental Specialist.

Department of Chemical Safety and Hazardous Waste Management.

General Authority of Meteorology and Environmental Protection, Saudi Arabia

²School of Engineering, University of Bolton, United Kingdom Programme leader of MRes in Environmental Management

Abstract

Soil contamination by petroleum hydrocarbons is a widespread and global environmental contamination concern that needs to be carefully treated and controlled. This research investigates, compare, and analyse the viability of bioremediation technologies for the ex situ remediation of hydrocarbon polluted soils. It also outlines the most appropriate bioremediation technique. Results showed one of the important advantages of necrophytoremediation as a remediation protocol. The degradation amount of oil in different treatments follows this sequence: pea straw (PS) > combination of pea straw and Bacillus consortium (BAPS) > Bacillus consortium (BA) > natural attenuation (NA). The same amount of “bacteria” was added into treatment BAPS and BA. Necrophytoremediation using pea straw has a positive effect on the degradation of TPH by 96% during 12 weeks of treatment; the same pattern was followed for the combination of necrophytoremediation and bioaugmentation (pea straw and Bacillus consortium) with 95% total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) reduction. Natural attenuation and bioaugmentation microcosms modified with Bacillus were the least practical with TPH reduction of 79% and 76% respectively. The findings from this study recommend researching the possibility of relying on in situ necrophytoremediation as valuable, economical and invulnerable method for enhancing the bioremediation efficiency of oil contaminated soils.

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