SINTEF Ocean, Trondheim, Norway; Department of Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
Department of Biotechnology and Food Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
Chemosphere. 2020 Sep;254:126836. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2020.126836. Epub 2020 Apr 22.
For oil spilled at sea, the main weathering processes are evaporation, emulsification, photo-oxidation, dispersion and biodegradation. Of these, only biodegradation may completely remove hydrocarbons from the environment in the long term, as the other processes only serve to transform and dilute the oil components. As petroleum development is moving north, the probability of Arctic oil spills increases. Hence, it is imperative to develop methods for comprehensive risk assessment of oil spills in cold and ice-covered waters. Accurate biodegradation rates are an essential part of this, as they are required to predict the long-term effects of marine oil spills. In this paper, we present experimentally determined biodegradation rates for the component groups which are used to represent oil in the OSCAR oil spill model. The experiments have been carried out at seawater temperatures of -2C, 0C, 5C, and 13C. We show that for the lighter and more soluble oil components, the changes in degradation rates between 0C and 13C are well captured by a constant Q scaling law. At lower temperatures, and for heavier and less soluble components, the rates are not well described by a constant Q, probably indicating that oil properties become important for the biodegradation rate.
对于海上溢油，主要的风化过程是蒸发、乳化、光氧化、分散和生物降解。在这些过程中，只有生物降解可能从长期来看完全将碳氢化合物从环境中去除，因为其他过程只是改变和稀释油成分。随着石油开发向北方转移，北极溢油的概率增加。因此，开发综合评估寒冷和冰覆盖水域溢油风险的方法势在必行。准确的生物降解率是这方面的重要组成部分，因为需要预测海洋溢油的长期影响。在本文中，我们提出了用于表示 OSCAR 溢油模型中油的组分的实验确定的生物降解率。实验在海水温度为-2°C、0°C、5°C 和 13°C 下进行。我们表明，对于较轻和更易溶解的油成分，在 0°C 和 13°C 之间降解率的变化很好地由恒定 Q 缩放定律捕获。在较低温度下，对于较重和较难溶解的成分，恒定 Q 并不能很好地描述速率，可能表明油的性质对生物降解速率变得重要。
