Oil-Eating Bacteria Eyed to Clean Solar Oil Spill

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) through its corporate arm, the Natural Resource Development Corporation (NRDC), is looking at biotechnology as a tool to combat the ill-effects of the August 11 Solar oil spill off the coast of Guimaras.

DENR Secretary Angelo T. Reyes said NRDC’s proposal to purchase a state-of –the-art machine that could reproduce billions of microbes that could eat oil slicks through a process called “bio-remediation.”

Bio-remediation was used to clean up an oil spill in Louisiana, USA, and the mess was cleaned up “in a matter of two months,” Reyes said.

The environment chief said that NRDC is eyeing Petron Phils. to help fund the purchase of the equipment which is available only in the United States.

NRDC president Rey Francis Alcozeba said the machine, available in the US, costs around $500,000 and is capable of reproducing the microbe at the rate of 100 million parts per milliliter.

“The machine is capable of producing the desired unadulterated microbes in large quantities that could make an impact on the oil slicks.

“Bio-remediation could really hasten the cleanup efforts in Guimaras. In contrast, it would take years for the oil to break down through a process called biodegradation if left to itself,” Alcozeba explained.

He declined, however, to give a time frame on how fast bio-remediation could hasten the cleaning process, noting that it would depend on the extent of the damage which DENR marine specialists are still determining.

“The technology is not new. Bio-remediation was also used in Venezuela to clean an oil spill last year,” Alcozeba added. In November 2005, a Danish shipping vessel carrying about 550 cubic meters of fuel oil collided with a Liberian vessel near Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo shipping lane that resulted in the leaking of oil from the Danish vessel.

According to Alcozeba, the microbes are classified by the United States Food and Drugs Administration as “Class 1 food-grade, none-pathogenic microorganism” and should therefore pose no hazard to the marine organisms in Guimaras. He assured that the microbes feeds only on the oil substance and quickly die once they run out of oil to feed on.

Commercially called as “pristine sea” microbes, the technology makes use of three oil-zapping bacteria, namely: Pseudomonas azelaica, Serratia mercescens, and Xanthomonas maltopilla.