Unofficial Conference Blog | Society of Environmental Journalists

Understanding the Role of Microbes in Biodegradation of Gulf Oil

The use of dispersants during the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster has been a thought- provoking, highly debatable issue. Speaking at a network lunch, Dr. Claire Paris-Limouzy from the University of Miami disagreed on using of dispersants to remove oil, saying that we have negligible knowledge about their impact on the ocean ecosystem. We also lack the basic knowledge about the chemical structure and what kind on dispersant to be used for a particular type of oil.

Thus, a lot of scientific research is required to understand and broaden our knowledge about dispersants, and how to use them at the right time, in the right way.

Many consider dispersants a never-use option, because they are harmful for the ocean ecosystem.  In my opinion part of oil was dispersed from ocean was possible only due to the use of dispersants.

Dr. Paris-Limouzy further explained that some amount of oil in the Gulf might have evaporated, weathered and submerged. She further added that  approximately 30 percent of oil is biodegradable and 40 percent is submerged and probably remains in the water column.

Several biological factors like microbes can help in degrading oil naturally. Thus, one needs to consider how these microbes help in degradation.

There are very few studies being done at present to find out the role of microbes in degradation of oil. I am working on one such project, with the objective to understand how microbial communities in near-shore environments respond to natural or anthropogenic exposure to hydrocarbons, and whether microbial communites in different habitats such as oyster beds, beach etc., respond in a similar way. The image above shows microbes degrading oil in the Gulf oil plume shown by Berkeley Lab. 

The image on left shows an analysis with Berkeley Lab’s phyloChip (an analyzing tool), revealing that the dominant microbe in the dispersed Gulf of Mexico oil plume was a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales.  

The image below demonstrates use of phyloChip in one of the project.

 

 

 

 

In my opinion use of dispersants might be useful for oil dispersion, but has toxic effects on deep sea fishes, and even on some microorganisms that are primary producers of ocean ecosystems, such as like phytoplankton driving photosysnthesis.

 

 

Alcanivorax borkumensis is the main microbe breaking down oil in the Gulf.

Video: Clark Fork River Superfund Site

 

This video was filmed during Society of Environmental Journalists Conference tour of the Clark Fork River Superfund Site, on Oct.14, 2010, as well as during the walk with Prof. Erick Greene on Oct. 17.

I edited the film on iMovie during layovers on my way home to Asheville, North Carolina.

A special thanks to everyone involved with the conference, especially the video workshops. I also have my first attempt at a photo blog and will soon have an essay up from the tour on my new blog.

Video: Preserving Wildlife in a Changing World

Conservation biologist Megan Parker trains dogs to find endangered and invasive species by sniffing out scat (bears, snow leopard) or even the creatures themselves (snails, noxious weeds). It's an inspired twist on the age-old practice of using the extraordinary canine sense of smell to find game, criminals, bombs, even cancer.

Parker gave us a demo with her Belgian shepherd Pepin in a field outside of Missoula, where she'd planted black bear scat.

 

I produced this video as part of the conference's great video training workshop: a day in the classroom at UMT on Wednesday, shooting video on the Thursday tours, and then back at the computer for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon to make something out of what we'd shot.  

I shot this on a Flip Mino and (when the batteries ran out) a Canon SD1400 IS point-&-shoot, and produced it using Final Cut Pro, and later added the titles with iMovie.  Other than a single-edit iMovie video of my daughter, this is my first video!  

Thanks to the great instructors, Denise Dowling, Jeremy Lurgio, Anne Medley and Kagan Yochim of the UMT School of Journalism, SEJ stalwart Amy Gahran, Amol Pavangadkar of Michigan State's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, Michael Scott of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and SEJ member Sara Shipley Hiles, who went from student at last year's not-so-successful video workshop to instructor at this year's workshop.

Video: Flathead Lake - The Pristine and the Alien

A grateful 20-20-20 fellowship recipient, I arrived early in Missoula to take the Wednesday video workshop. On Thursday, I headed out to Flathead Lake with my Nikon D90 (but, sorry, no tripod), and on Saturday afternoon, turned the footage into this, my very first video.

 

 

Energy: Hedging and Betting on the Tar Sands' Future Footprint

Some day, all roads will lead to Alberta...that is, if the Canadian province's vast oil reserve known as the tar sands continues its steep development trajectory.

According to Janet Annesley, vice president of communications for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, everything changed for Alberta in 2002, when the U.S. Department of Energy officially declared the Alberta tar sands as an economically and politically feasible source of energy. With a flick of its regulatory pen, the DOE shifted the landscape of the whole energy-consuming world.

As Annesley explained, the tar sands oil reserve constitutes "half the investible oil in the free world."

Oil reserves of unequalled magnitude means environmental impacts and challenges on similar scales. The speakers gathered for the Friday morning session represented voices from all sides of the environmental and regulatory debate:

Chemical Dispersants and You: What It's All About

A "chemical dispersant" is a clever name for a surfactant, which is nothing more than a soap! Well, sort of. Surfactants are molecules which are defined by having two parts (think of soap on a rope): a water-loving head group (the soap), and an oil-loving tail group (the rope). Now, the chemicals deployed in the Gulf are a little more complex than common house soap, but their mechanism is the same. These dispersants work their way to the oil-water interface, and push their tails into the oil while keeping their heads in the water.

I mentioned the idea of "minimum energy" in a previous post. By this, I mean that most of these chemical systems are trying to be as comfortable as possible (who can blame them?). Well, the same logic applies here. By keeping their heads in water and tails in oil, these dispersants are able to minimize the energy of the water, dispersant, and oil system! A byproduct of this minimum energy is that the droplets can afford to be smaller in size. At the end of the day, the logic is that adding a good dispersant allows you to have smaller droplets.

If your objective is to keep oil from rising all the way to the top of the ocean, then why are small droplets good? As the droplets get smaller, they have a higher and higher pressure inside (think of squeezing a sealed balloon to 10% of its original size). When the inside pressure is high enough, then the forces of buoyancy and gravity become very small, and the motion of the droplets is primarily governed by the motion of the ocean (meaning that they go with the flow … literally).

Another byproduct of dispersants is that the resulting droplets have these water-loving heads (the soap part) sticking out all over them! If the droplets are small enough (something less than the width of a hair), then these head groups will act as spikes to stop any one droplet from interacting with any other droplet. Remember back to when you used to blow bubbles as a kid? When the bubbles collided, they burst and the air inside of them combined. For the sake of analogy, imagine those bubbles were clad in metal spikes; it would be pretty darn difficult to burst any of them since you couldn't get past the spikes! This illustrates the second effect of dispersants; they prevent the oil droplets from getting back together in water, which means they can stay suspended in water indefinitely. 

I hope that you found this humorous little exploration of dispersants useful; please post any questions!

 

Oil Sands Lead to Muddy Waters

Quick -- behind Saudi Arabia, which country has the second largest wealth of crude oil? Canada, our neighbors to the North, are sitting on between 60 and 70 billion barrels of oil, according to this morning's Energy & Economy panel. We also heard from Kyle Isakower this afternoon that crude oil is here to stay, at least for the the foreseeable future. So how is Canada planning to reconcile the ever-increasing global demand for oil with its conservative population and moderate regulation? 

Peter Hodson of Queen's University mentioned that the chemical fingerprint of oil sand extraction is inescapable, and to date the environmental science monitoring has been funded through the government and joint industry partners. Preston McEachern, of Alberta Environment, explained that there is a tremendous amount of natural water that runs through the oil sands environment, leading to a natural pollution of downstream waters. By this extension, McEachern argued that there is little to validate concerns over expanded oil sands production, because environmental scientists have not been able to decouple the increased watershed pollution of production from that which occurs naturally in runoff.

As Canada approaches this problem, there are a number of solution pathways available. For one, I have had the chance to interact with Norwegian scientists and engineers -- particularly in the context of Statoil, the national oil company of Norway. Because Statoil is owned by the Norwegian people, they enforce some of the strictest environmental regulations on the planet. Despite this, they are able to produce a phenomenal amount of oil (and profit) for the country, through joint industry projects with other global energy producers. This may not be an entirely appropriate solution for Canada, but it's certainly a model that has been successful in the past.

Forty billion gallons of toxic water

SEJ's Thursday tour of  the Clark Fork River Superfund cleanup sites took us to Butte, home of the immense Berkeley Pit copper mine. Here the abandoned open pit mine contains 40 billion gallons of acidic mine water with a pH of 2.5 -- about the same as vinegar.

The water contains the proverbial witches brew of manganese, cadmium, arsenic, copper, and a host of other less scary stuff. The big concern as far as human health goes, is the arsenic, although for fisheries aluminum and zinc can be problematic.

Pollination, Pesticides, Fungus: Mini-tour, network lunch addresses threats to bees

A mysterious illness has decimated honeybees around the world. An article in the October 6 edition of The New York Times reported that new research blames a fungs tag-teaming with a virus for the die-off.

A Fortune story two days later took issue with this research.  Reporter Katherine Eban pointed to financial ties between Bromenshenk and Bayer AG, the chemical company that produces the pesticides blamed for the neurological disorders that make bees unable to navigate and work.

Janet Raloff, senior editor at Science News, and Beth Daley, environmental reporter for the Boston Globe, will co-host a Saturday mini-tour on this threat to bees, called "colony collapse disorder." Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula will lead the mini-tour. Also, a member of the Montana team will lead a network lunch on CCD.

I look forward to learning more about this urgent problem at these sessions. Thanks, Janet and Beth, for putting them together.

What's Your SEJ 2010 Game Plan?

I’m a pretty direct person, but I was a little shocked with my actions yesterday. I asked an energy scientist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory if I could meet him at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning to discuss his research.

You could call it presumptuous, but it's part of my advance planning for the SEJ conference. The Saturday in question is Saturday, Oct. 16, which is the day this scientist, Dr. Jeffery Greenblatt, will speak at a panel I’m moderating on clean energy technology and the environment.

Another motivation for this meeting is fear that I won't be able to take notes during my panel. As moderator, I anticipate my role will look more like traffic control, making sure SEJers line up at the microphone for questions.

So, what’s your conference game plan?