LAT: Gulf Oil Spill: Bacteria mainly ate the gas, not the oil

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Bacteria that attacked the plumes of oil and gas from the Deepwater Horizon gusher in the Gulf of Mexico mainly digested natural gas spewing from the wellhead — propane, ethane and butane — rather than oil, according to a study published in the journal Science.

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The team observed other chemical changes that suggested the bacteria were at work digesting gas. They saw that types of propane and ethane that bacteria prefer to digest — ones containing carbon-12, a lighter isotope of carbon — were depleted in samples.

And they found that the levels of oxygen (which bacterial populations consume as they grow) in the water fell in step with the falling levels of propane and ethane. They concluded that 70% of oxygen depletion was the result of microbial digestion of these natural gas chemicals, suggesting that most of the bacterial action was against gas, not oil.

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"This paper is opening the door to other questions," said Camilli, who was not involved with this research but published a paper in an August edition of Science on the size of the gulf spill's oil plume. "If it's disproportionately natural gas that's being degraded, what's going on with the crude oil components?"

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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/09/gulf-oil-spill-bacteria-mainly-ate-the-gas-not-the-oil.html