Amicrobial process originally designed to remediate soils contaminated with hydrocarbons has accelerated the recovery of bitumen from oil sands fivefold in bench-scale tests conducted at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL, South Carolina; srnl.doe.gov). The heart of the process is BioTiger, a consortium of about a dozen different microbes that were collected and screened from an old petroleum-refinery-waste lagoon. In bioremediation, some of the microbes produce surfactants to make hydrocarbons available for degradation by other microbes.
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