Abstract:
Contaminated soil is thought to be reaching dangerous levels in almost all regions of the world; soil contaminated with oily sludge is one of the most serious environmental threats if managed improperly. Bioremediation techniques have been successfully used to cleanup sites contaminated with oily sludge. The purpose of this work was to analyze the best possible solution along with the least environmental threats, for the soil which has been contaminated with oily sludge. Bioremediation is a process that uses microorganisms, fungi, green plants or their enzymes to return the natural environment altered by contaminants to its original condition.
The study was conducted in ARL (Attock Refinery Limited) in order to enhance the activity of biodegradation process. For this purpose, three soil samples were collected from different refinery locations contaminated with oily hydrocarbons. The contaminated soil used in this study was obtained from MOL (Kohat oil field), PARCO (Muzafargarh field), and OGDCL (Qadirpur oil field). In four weeks of incubation, soils contaminated with oil showed greater degradation of oil than control (oil contamination free soil) because these soils were immune to environment and had higher rate of microbial activity while control showed little or gradual microbial activity. PARCO sample showed highest degradability and OGDCL and MOL were almost equal in degradation.
Our overall study clearly shows that bioremediation can effectively degrade petroleum hydrocarbons. This process is economical and can be used easily, so to reduce the increasing threat of environmental pollution through oil contamination, this strategy could be the best solution to reduce oil pollution.
