Whatever happened to those oil-eating bacteria?

Wasn't this something under development several decades ago, or was it just the premise of some sci fi that I'm remembering?

edit:

See, I wasn't imagining it:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050517063708.htm

A Hope For Oil Spill Bioremediation

ScienceDaily (May 17, 2005) — A recently published article in Environmental Microbiology reveals that indigenous microbiota of the Galician shore is readily able to degrade crude oil. Scientists from the Estación Experimental del Zaidín (Spanish Council for Research, CSIC) in Granada investigated in situ crude oil degradation after the Prestige oil spill in November 2002.

could also eat asphalt roads, roofing shingles, and maybe even mutate to eat other petro-chemical products. I don't think I would want them to use it even if they have it.

Them, and Boeing.

I believe you're thinking of sci fi. All I know is that in the Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld, more than 90% of the human population is wiped out by oil eating nanos. As it turns out, we were trying to clean up an oil spill with this new technology, when it got out of hand, and went after anything made out of oil. Which included cars, clothing, makeup, etc. Everything basically became a bomb.

if you dare

I hope you get an answer.

They just still haven't managed to create an environment in which to mass "breed" them.

Found an article which explains their potential use and how we've not yet reached that point.

The ability of some bacteria to metabolize oil has been well known for more than a century. But so far efforts to exploit these capabilities for remediation efforts have faltered. "It has been used in the past and was a complete failure," says Victor de Lorenzo, deputy director of the National Center of Biotechnology in Madrid, Spain.

In one example, bacteria were used experimentally to try to help clean up the 11 million gallons of crude oil spewed out by the Exxon Valdez after it ran aground off the coast of Alaska in 1989. But it didn't make any difference, says de Lorenzo.

The problem was not a lack of bacteria, he says. Indeed, though the oil-eating bacteria are not common in unpolluted environments, they are plentiful where there is oil; A. borkumensis makes up as much as 90 percent of microbial populations in oil spills. The challenge in using these bacteria to clean up oil lies in creating the right conditions for them to grow faster and metabolize oil more efficiently. Cleanup workers have started to do this: "Now it is standard practice to add nutrients like oil-soluble forms of nitrogen and phosphorus to oil spills," says de Lorenzo. However, they still have no real understanding of what specific nutrients the bacteria need, says Martins dos Santos.

Because bacterial remediation methods have not succeeded, cleaning up oil spills still depends mainly on the laborious process of physically removing the oil using booms and introducing chemical dispersants to break up what remains. But such methods are less than ideal. Recovering oil physically is expensive, and the chemically dispersed oil that remains in the sea still poses a threat to the environment even if it is no longer visible on the surface.

But decoding the genome of organisms like A. borkumensis is going to make a difference, says Jan van Beilen, a microbiologist who studies the molecular genetics of oil-eating organisms at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology in Zurich, Switzerland. The genomic information has revealed molecular transport mechanisms that enable the organism to scavenge nutrients from its environment. This should, in turn, help identify which forms of phosphorus and nitrogen would create the best conditions for the bacteria.

More: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17230&ch=biotech&pg=1

Hope that helps to clear it up a bit. :)

A friend of a friend's father was involved in isolating some of them.

Unfortunately, the oil spill in the Gulf is so massive they'd be completely overwhelmed. They might be able to take care of shoreline contamination from whatever doesn't get burned off.

as well as oil-eating fungi. It's really a matter of size, scaling and inoculation. You need to have enough inoculate over enough area with the right conditions of temperature to make it work. If you were to spread one inch of sawdust inoculated with the right oil-eating microbes over the surface of the slick, the oil could be gone in a matter of a few weeks. Unfortunately, that's a LOT of sawdust, and keeping that much culture dormant but alive on suitable media is a big, big undertaking. You can't just put in an order and pick it up the next day at Wal-Mart.

On edit: If you really want to understand biodegredation, watch the video at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5frPV58tY

However, the oil will kill billions of tons of sea life before that process is complete.

There are plenty of oil-eating microbes; the microbes in ordinary compost also can "eat" oil. But getting them into a convenient, easy-to-store, easy-to-use form is the problem.

It looks like we're going to be forced to rely on industrial hygiene -- forced, I say!

--d!

Can't drink another drop. They tried to save room for dessert, but....