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Petrol and Petroleum Products |
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Petrol
and
Petroleum
Products - More than 10 million metric tons of oil pollutants enter the marine environment each year due to accidental spillages and disposal of oily wastes. Most of the oil pollution infact comes not from major oil spills, but from minor spills associated with routine operations.
After evaporation of volatile fraction of petroleum waste, the residue is dissipated mainly by microbial degradation and to a lesser degree by autooxidation and photo oxidation. There are two steps in hydrocarbon oxidation. (i) conversion of initial hydrocarbon to suitable substrate for next step, by specialised activities, and (ii) methyl group oxidation to carboxylic acid.
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Petroleum is a complex mixture composed primarily of aliphatic, alicyclic and aromatic hydrocarbons. There are hundreds of individual compounds in every crude oil. Thus fate of oil pollutants in environment is complex. The challenge for microbes to degrade all of the components of a petroleum mixture is immense.
Nevertheless, microbial biodegradation of petroleum is a major process and that's why oceans are not covered with oil today. In 1978 wreck of the supertanker Amoco cadiz off the coast of France, microbes biodegraded 10 tons of oil everyday in the affected area.Bacteria and yeasts can grow on several fractions of hydrocarbons e.g. heptane, decane, hexadecane etc.
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