Petroleum-eating microbes significantly reduced gulf oil plume

08-24-2010 • Washington Post

Petroleum-eating bacteria - which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor - proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

1 Comments in Response to Petroleum-eating microbes significantly reduced gulf oil plume

Comment by PureTrust

Entered on: 8/25/2010 8:35:08 AM

What is the resulting material a microbe excretes after it eats the oil?

What microbe can convert that excreted material directly into gasoline?

Is the excreted material available on land, freely and cheaply, all over the place?

Is the gasoline producing microbe readily available, too?

Could we have had free gasoline all along except that we haven't applied, personally, what the biologists and chemists have learned long ago?