Bioremediation of oil-contaminated soil: microbiological methods for feasibility assessment and field evaluation

Bioremediation is emerging as a promising technology for the treatment of soil and groundwater contamination. The technology is very effective particularly in dealing with petroleum hydrocarbon contamination. However, bioremediation is a site-specific process and feasibility studies are required before full-scale remediation can be successfully applied. The type and scale of the feasibility studies that will be needed are specific to the bioremediation approach to be employed during full-scale clean-up operation. In all cases however, these studies have the same goals: to accurately determine if specific hydrocarbon contaminants are amenable to biological treatment and to determine the time and cost required to treat the contaminants of concern according to the regulated clean-up criteria. This contribution provides background information on the chemistry and microbiology of hydrocarbon contamination, discusses the prospective of using biological methods for addressing this problem and describes several microbiological methods which car, be used for the feasibility assessment of soil bioremediation. The focus of this chapter is to highlight the needs for the integration of laboratory data to Full-scale bioremediation. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.