Biosurfactant-Enhanced Petroleum Oil Bioremediation

Hydrocarbon compounds, ranging from crude oil to its derivative products, have the potential to cause environmental problems on a global scale. The emergence of these hydrocarbon compounds in the ecosystem makes it a concern to general health of public and environmental aspects, owing to their toxic nature, low to less biodegradability, and potentially accumulated in the food chain. Various technologies have been employed for cleaning contaminated sites with hydrocarbon compounds, including physical and chemical approaches such as thermal desorption, soil washing, soil flushing, and solvent extraction technique. Increasing public awareness of more environmentally friendly methods encourages the use of biodegradation concept in its effort to decontaminate sites. This chapter will discuss the hazard of petroleum oil contamination to the environment, its cleanup methods including physical-chemical-biological process, and biosurfactants role in enhancing the remediation process. It is well known that some bacteria are capable to produce surface-active agent of what is so-called biosurfactants. Biosurfactants have some advantages compare to its synthetic counterparts, i.e., biodegradable, low level of toxicity, biocompatible, high availability of production of raw materials, and very useful for environmental management, i.e., in oil spills handling and bioremediation of industrial wastes contaminated soils. However, the most important biosurfactant weaknesses are in the case of large-scale production. High production costs are not suitable for environmental remediation field applications that require surfactants at low cost and large volumes. Some strategies to overcome these issues and also a case study of field-scale application are presented in this chapter.