INVESTIGATION OF THE BIOREMEDIATION PERFORMANCE OF COW-DUNG AND WIRE-CROTON ON CRUDE OIL POLLUTED SOIL

Abstract

Crude oil exploration is associated with oil spillage causing environmental degradation including loss of soil fertility and biodiversity. Various technologies are available for remediating crude oil polluted soil, but, bioremediation seems to be more environmentally friendly and cost effective. Thus, the current work is on the bioremediation of crude oil polluted soil using cow dung and wire  croton leave as the amendments. It was conducted as a batch process and was monitored for 42 days (six weeks). Separate cow dung and wire croton, and different quantities of cow dung and wire croton were blended to remediate the soil. The analysis conducted included the Total Petroleum Hydrocarbon (TPH), Hydrocarbon utilizing Bacterial (HUB) and the Total Organic Carbon (TOC) content of the soil.  The result shows that wire croton and cow dung have the potential to be used as bioremediation nutrients. When these nutrients were mixed at different proportions, the combination involving 30 g of cow dung and 30 g of wire croton gave the least performance in terms of HUB, TPH and TOC across the duration of the study, and the maximum was achieved using 200 g of cow dung and 200 g of wire croton as shown by over 650 thousand HUB increment, 95 % hydrocarbon degradation, and 76.3 % total organic carbon obtained. This shows that appropriate combinations of cow dung and wire croton is required to obtain a higher performance using both nutrients for remediating a crude oil polluted soil.