Replicating bioremediation on an oil spill at home

[Chris98]

Hey,

For my science fair project at school (10th grade) this year my group and I have decided to see and compare which oil cleaning process works better - bio-remediation or chemical dispersion.
I was wondering how you would be able to replicate the cleaning process at home. For chemical dispersion we read that dish detergent could be used, and used car oil for the oil spill. Now we have a couple of problems:

-How would we replicate the bioremediation? On the NOAA site it was said that fertilizers high in nitrates can be used, but we weren't sure how to go about using it on the "spill"
-What is the ratio of how much oil should be spilled in the water, and how much detergent and fertilizer should be used? We would like to finish the experiment in a month, so we weren't planning on making a large spill, but we weren't sure the portions we should use.

Thank you!

[deleted-141593]

Hi Chris98!

This is a great subject! I think it would help to first decide from what you will be cleaning the oil. Will you be cleaning oil from water, or oil from solid surfaces that the water encounters? Adding to detergent to an oil slick on water would not remove the oil directly but could enable removal by other means (skimming for example). As for bio-remediation, nitrogen and phosphorus have been used and have been fairly effective in accelerating the bio-degradation process by some reports, however, this requires that there already be indigenous microorganisms capable of consuming the oil in the sample. This means you would need a water sample with a diversity of microorganisms in it, that is, tap water would not be appropriate.

The module linked here from Washington state University could be of use: http://www.chebe.wsu.edu/modules/97modu ... module.htm

See what you think and post back to help me refine your ideas. Again, it's a great basic idea!

Cheers,
Colin

[Chris98]

Thanks for the reply!

We were planning on cleaning the oil off water. There is a creek near us, but we did a test on it and there are few micro-organisms that are in it (mostly mayflies). A park near us also has a river which has fish in it which we could also get water from. Would one of these sources do?

For the chemical dispersion I was thinking of putting detergent on the oil in the water and skimming it off (have to figure out how to make a skimmer). I read that dispersion works better in moving waters, so would I stir the water to replicate waves after adding the detergents and before skimming?

In the link you gave me, they added 5ml of water and 2ml of oil to a 30g sample of soil, and I was wondering whether the soil would not just absorb the water? If so what measurements could I use (for chemical dispersion as well)?

I hope this helps, sorry if it is a bit confusing because science fairs are new to me
Chris

[deleted-71536]

Hi Chris,

Colin has given you some great advice, and I hope he posts with more! In the mean time, I encourage you to do some searching on the internet. For example, I searched "cleaning oil off water" and found this interesting site: http://inhabitat.com/top-5-green-ways-t ... il-spills/

You can also search the term "bioremediation" to get ideas and some background information.

I hope this helps.

Heather

[deleted-141593]

Hi Chris,

I think another thing you need to think about, which you alluded to, is how are you going to measure the effectiveness of cleanup? If you are skimming you can measure the volume (or weight) of oil recovered vs added. However, this is made difficult by water contamination of the recovered oil. Also, the bioremediation is meant to digest the oil so the amount recovered would be less if it is effective, making a comparison to detergent+skimming difficult. How about this for an idea, use skimming alone as the control to determine how much oil you can recover from the water surface. Then compare this to the volume of oil recovered from the samples that got microbes or microbe-containing water. The measure of bioremediation effectiveness is how much less oil you recover from the samples with microbes, thus, you are in effect measuring how much oil they metabolized. Think about it.

-Colin