Abstract
Crude oil pollution has been a common challenge in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The use of biological remediation has helped to detoxify and restore the ecosystems damaged by crude oil spillage. Nutrient addition has been proven to be an effective strategy to enhance oil biodegradation, as they could utilize crude oil as the source of carbon and energy and give a reasonably high biodegradation rate. The effect of biostimulants on the bioremediation of crude oil-polluted water was investigated in this study. Four samples, each having crude oil to water ratio of 1:4 was used. Three sets of samples were each inoculated with microbial load 1x 106cfu/ml of Aspergillus Niger, and Pseudomonas Aeruginosa as microbial consortium. All the samples, including the controls, were closely observed for a period of seven weeks at one-week interval for the physiochemical parameters such as pH, Dissolved Oxygen (DO), Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), Total Hydrocarbon Content (THC), turbidity, and total microbial count. Of all these parameters, only BOD, DO, turbidity, and THC were seen to decrease generally with time of remediation for all the samples. Maximum reductions in value of 94.04%, 97.45%, and 99.09% were achieved for turbidity, BOD, and THC respectively at the microbial consortium load of 1x 10 6cfu/ml.
Highlights
The need for a cleaner environment cannot be overemphasized
The highest value of dissolved oxygen was observed in the sample labelled C; this can be attributed to remediation process stimulated by the presence of NPK fertilizer, the biostimulant
The dissolved oxygen level is directly related to good water quality and vice versa
Summary
The need for a cleaner environment cannot be overemphasized. The pollution of our environment poses a threat to both human life, plants, animals and on materials. A large source of these contaminants is attributed to oil spills on land and sea. Petroleum hydrocarbons contamination of the environment associated with exploration, development and production operations is a common feature in oil producing nations around the world, especially in a developing country like Nigeria where the incidence of facilities sabotage, operational failures, accidental discharges, pipeline vandalization and leakages, bunkering and artisanal refining is very common [5]. Crude Oil is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds, including some organometallic constituents [8]. It contains hundreds of thousands of aliphatic, branched and aromatic hydrocarbons [18, 22], most of which are toxic to living organisms
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