Bioremediation of a petroleum contaminated soil with high clay content

D. M. Pala, Programa de Engenharia Qumica/COPPE/ UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; D. D. C. Freire, Departamento de Engenharia Bioqumica/Escola de Qumica/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, G. L. SantAnna Jr., Programa de Engenharia Qumica/COPPE/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Bioremediation Of A Petroleum Contaminated Soil With High Clay Content

A critical environmental impact of the petroleum industry is the spillage of oil and related products that causes severe soil contamination. Although biodegradation of petroleum hydrocarbons may be successfully conducted under controlled conditions, the bioremediation of large volumes of contaminated soils still present some technical challenges, particularly when contamination occurs in soils with high clay content. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the bioremediation of petroleum contaminated claysoil by biopile composting. Firstly the soil characteristics were determined: pH, density, moisture, nitrogen and phosphorous content, organic matter and total oil hydrocarbon content. Determinations were performed for both contaminated and non-contaminated soil samples. To evaluate the ability of naturally occurring microorganisms to degrade soil contaminants, short-term experiments were carried out in slurryphase reactors. Biodegradation tests were conducted in 250-mL Erlenmeyer flasks incubated at room temperature in a rotary shaker (200 rpm). The results obtained from a factorial experiment showed that the addition of a nitrogen source and pH adjustment to 7.0 were important requirements to achieve appreciable levels of biodegradation (45%) in short-term assays (13 days). The number of colony-forming heterotrophic bacteria observed in those experiments showed that the soil microbial population was below the recommended values for bioremediation processes. Therefore, a microbial consortium was developed through a long period of liquid cultivation and it will be used as inoculum in further experiments that will be conducted in aerated bench-scale fixed-bed reactors. In this set of experiments, operation conditions will be selected to perform biodegradation assays in a 5-kg biopile.