Abstract
Simple SummaryAnthropogenic activities in cold regions require petroleum oils to support various purposes. With the increased demand of petroleum, accidental oil spills are generated during transportation or refuelling processes. Soil is one of the major victims in petroleum pollution, hence studies have been devoted to find solutions to remove these petroleum hydrocarbons. However, the remote and low-temperature conditions in cold regions hindered the implementation of physical and chemical removal treatments. On the other hand, biological treatments in general have been proposed as an innovative approach to attenuate these hydrocarbon pollutants in soils. To understand the relevancy of biological treatments for cold regions specifically, bibliometric analysis has been applied to systematically analyse studies focused on hydrocarbon removal treatment in a biological way. To expedite the understanding of this analysis, we have summarised these biological treatments and suggested other biological applications in the context of cold conditions.The increased usage of petroleum oils in cold regions has led to widespread oil pollutants in soils. The harsh environmental conditions in cold environments allow the persistence of these oil pollutants in soils for more than 20 years, raising adverse threats to the ecosystem. Microbial bioremediation was proposed and employed as a cost-effective tool to remediate petroleum hydrocarbons present in soils without significantly posing harmful side effects. However, the conventional hydrocarbon bioremediation requires a longer time to achieve the clean-up standard due to various environmental factors in cold regions. Recent biotechnological improvements using biostimulation and/or bioaugmentation strategies are reported and implemented to enhance the hydrocarbon removal efficiency under cold conditions. Thus, this review focuses on the enhanced bioremediation for hydrocarbon-polluted soils in cold regions, highlighting in situ and ex situ approaches and few potential enhancements via the exploitation of molecular and microbial technology in response to the cold condition. The bibliometric analysis of the hydrocarbon bioremediation research in cold regions is also presented.
Highlights
In recent years, oil pollutants have significantly contaminated cold climate regions, raising problematic environmental concerns
Many theories can be proposed on the feasibility of bioremediation of hydrocarbons for soil pollution, this is probably pointing to the sure fact of biodegradation of oil happening among soil degraders, naturally occurring in the environment
The first group is the in situ bioremediation, in which the removal treatment is performed at its native location without any geographical transfers, while the latter group is the ex situ bioremediation, which involves the translocation of contaminated substances from its native place into a treatment plant [23]
Summary
Oil pollutants have significantly contaminated cold climate regions, raising problematic environmental concerns. Oil pollution in cold environments (i.e., Arctic, Antarctica and other cold climate regions) can be found in surface soils, deep-sea waters, marine sediments and permafrost [4,5,6,7] The harsh environments, such as the cold temperature, insufficient nutrients, low pollutant bioavailability and the tedious freeze–thaw activities, under cold regions has led to a higher vulnerability towards the petroleum pollutants compared to the tropical and temperate environments [8]. Chemical and thermal treatments (i.e., soil excavation, permeable reactive barriers, liquid–liquid extraction, thermal desorption and electrokinetic) can be applied to eradicate the hydrocarbon-contaminated sites of different sources, including sea water, soils and sediments [10,11,12] These methods usually require high maintenance costs, complex operational skills and pose harmful threats to the cold climate ecosystem [13,14]. The potential applications of molecular and microbial technology to tackle various limitations are discussed
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