Evaluation of the potential of agricultural wastes-cattle manure and poultry manure for bioremediation of crude oil-contaminated soil

Abstract

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria suffers from petroleum pollution, which affects ecosystem functioning and human health, which necessitates finding sustainable remediation options that utilize local resources. In this work, cattle manure (CM) and poultry manure (PM), which are primarily utilized as biofertilizer for agricultural purposes, were utilized to bioremediate crude oil-contaminated soil on a laboratory scale. In addition to being readily accessible, CM and PM are also sustainable bioresources that are host to a wide variety of microflora that can be used for bioaugmentation. At the end of the 1.5 month study, the impact of the amendments on speciated total petroleum hydrocarbons (STPH) in the range of nC10-nC40 was evaluated. A significantly higher STPH degradation of 36% in PM-amended soil was observed compared to CM-amended soil (23%); and only 1% degradation in enhanced by natural attenuation soil (RENA). The pre-dominant aliphatic fractions in the samples analyzed were nC16-nC35. In comparison to the CM amendment option, PM amendments achieved better bioremediation of these fractions. Moreover, the effect of biowaste ratio amendment to the contaminated soil showed that the ratio 1:1 (w/w) for both bioadmendments performed better than the ratio 1:2 (w/w), suggesting that the higher the amount of amendment to contaminated soil, the more effective the bioremediation. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of PM as a sustainable, affordable, and local bioremediation technique for recovering soil contaminated by crude oil in the Niger Delta.