Bioremediation of Water Areas Due to Oil Spills

There are various methods that can be used to cleanup an oil spill on a waterway. There are physical, chemical, and biological alternatives. The biological method is also known as bioremediation, which can be broken down into bioaugmentation and biostimulation. Bioaugmentation is the addition of microbe cultures to a contaminated area to increase the number of microbes that can degrade the oil and hydrocarbons. Biostimulation is the addition of nutrients to the contaminated area. These nutrients allow the resident microbial population to have enough nutrients to thrive and grow in numbers and size. This larger population then is able to degrade the toxins in the oil. Bioremediation is a new technology that is emerging. There are numerous tests going on to determine the effectiveness of bioremediation as well as the cost efficiency of this method. The Exxon Valdez hit a reef in 1989 and spilled millions of gallons of oil. This incident showed the lack of information that the US has regarding oil spills and how to clean them up (OTA, 1991). This led to increased research and the beginning of bioremediation. The Exxon Valdez oil spill was one of the first times that bioremediation was looked at as an alternative to cleaning up an oil spill. Extensive research was done to determine the feasibility of bioremediation as an alternative. Since this time, more research has been conducted and more will continue, to find the proper places to use bioremediation as an alternative to cleanup oil spills