Petroleum oil spills are considered a major contribution to environmental disturbance for the exposed ecosystems and can cause severe health issues for humans. Biosorbe AB's GreenAll absorbent has been shown to efficiently absorb oil, and has great potential for bioremediation purposes as a tool for letting the absorbent remove the oil from a contaminated spot, and then removing the absorbent to reclaim the oil. For applications in nature where reclaiming the absorbent is not desired or possible, a better solution could be to combine the GreenAll absorbent with microorganisms that degrade the oils in situ. However, the GreenAll absorbent was designed to have certain antimicrobial properties, and microorganisms may degrade cellulose which the GreenAll absorbent is mainly composed of. This is why this project aimed to investigate whether it was possible for hydrocarbon degrading microorganisms to be combined with the GreenAll absorbent, without them having a negative impact on each other. For this project two hydrocarbon degrading bacterial species as well as a commercial microbial mixture were chosen to be combined with both GreenAll and a reference material. This project investigates the feasibility of combining the GreenAll absorbent with hydrocarbon degrading microorganisms by growing the chosen microorganisms and assaying their enzymatic activities in different conditions. It also assesses the ability of the microorganisms to degrade petroleum hydrocarbons when they are combined with the absorbent, as well as investigating how different temperatures, different media and carbon source concentrations impact the degradation and survival of the microorganisms.

This study shows that the microorganisms investigated did grow when combined with the GreenAll absorbent. It was also shown that the microorganisms had a low enzymatic activity for the absorbent, but that they caused some loss of structural integrity of the absorbent over time. One of the investigated species as well as the microbial mixture showed measurable degradation of petroleum hydrocarbons and grew at multiple temperatures, and to a certain extent in pure seawater as medium. The result from this study indicate a possible additive e ect of using the GreenAll absorbent and hydrocarbon degrading microorganisms as a combined product formulation. These results call for further studies to result in a commercial product.