The use of Mixed Bacterial Culture to improve the Biodegradation of Diesel Pollution

Abstract

This study was conducted to evaluate the hydrocarbon biodegradation abilities of Enterobacter cloacae, Staphylococcus aureus, Sphingomonas paucimobilis, and Pentoae species which were isolated from different diesel-contaminated soil samples. The isolates were identified by the Vitek 2 system. Fourier-transform spectroscopy (FT-IR) tested the potential of these isolates to biodegrade the diesel according to the peak areas, a significant decrease in the area of the peaks at 2856-2928 cm−1 corresponds to aliphatic hydrocarbons. The appearance of small peaks at 900-1032 cm−1 refers to substituted benzene derivative compounds. An appearance of some new peaks at 3010- 3030 cm−1 which indicate the presence of alcohol (-OH) and ketones (RC=O). A sharp peak appeared at 1712 cm−1 refers to the carbonyl group (C=O). The potential of biological surfactant production was tested using the Sigma 703D stand-alone tensiometer showed that these isolates were biological surfactant producers. The better results of the surface tension reduction test were obtained when using the mixed bacterial culture which reduced the surface tension of the medium from 66 mN/m to 35.15 mN/m. Single isolates and mixed bacterial culture have investigated their ability to degrade 3.0 % (v/v) of diesel as sole source of carbon and energy in Bushnell- Haas medium. The results demonstrated that the bacterial isolates could be effective in biodegradation of diesel spills individually and showed good biodegradation abilities when they are used together in the mixed bacterial culture.

Studying the treatability of different types of nanoparticles for oil content removal from oily wastewater produced from refinery process

“…Petroleum refineries are consisting of various processes such as distillation, hydro-treating, desalting and cooling systems that depend on the type of crude oil refined and the required products. Each refinery process consumes large amount of water, that may reach about 80 million cubic meter every day in comparison to other industrial activities in a given region [1,2]; Oil pollution may arise either accidentally or operationally whenever the oil is produced, transported, stored and treated, or when it is used on land or at sea [3], hence, huge amount of wastewater is discharged annually which are different in their properties depending on the process specification and its arrangement. Oily wastewaters are classified as a great crisis affecting the aquatic systems and therefore it is extremely important to find efficient and suitable methods to treat these oily water [4,5].…”