Bioremediation to Treat the World’s Worst Ever Recorded Oil Contamination Case

Abstract

The soil pollution issue in Kuwait was a result of the burning of the oil wells during the 1990 Gulf War. The contaminated soil’s consequences have become more dangerous in many aspects, such as groundwater, dust action, human and animal’s health. In this research, a bio-remediating technology known as the vermi-remediation was chosen to treat the oil contaminated soil by using of earthworms. The objective of this project is to conduct a series of experiments to conclude whether this technique is effective in treating Kuwait’s soil and to what extent. The treatment results were found to surpass the results of the currently being implemented methods by both contamination percentage drops and time of treatment. The system was found to treat up to 62% in the TPH level for highly oilcontaminated soil samples, 55% for medium oil-contaminated soil samples and 71% for low oil-contaminated soil samples within three