Oil-eating bacteria feasted on oil from Deepwater Horizon's broken well says scientist

Harlan Kirgan - 

Oil-eating bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico devoured crude oil gushing from the broken Deepwater Horizon wellhead last summer, said Terry Hazen, a leading researcher into the 2010 spill.

"If I had to look for oil-degrading bacteria, I would have done it in the Gulf of Mexico," Hazen said to more than 100 people attending the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratory's biennial Grimes Distinguished Lecturer Series on Wednesday night.

Hazen is co-director of the Virtual Institute for Microbial Stress and Survival at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, managed by the University of California. He also is head of the laboratory's Center for Environmental Biotechnology.

In a lecture entitled, "Can Mother Nature Take a Punch? Microbes and the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf," Hazen described how his research team of about 50 scientists studied the spill from May 25 to Oct. 20, 2010.

They found that that 35 percent of the light crude from the spill evaporated within two days, and in a week 45 percent had evaporated, he said.

But it was bacteria that acted like "oil-seeking missiles" that feasted on the oil, he said.

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