Today, I'm going to create an oil spill  in my home and then try to clean it up.

That would be a total nightmare to deal with.

So I'm going to use these tanks instead.

That is good.

Look at that estimation.

This one here will be my control and this spill,  I'm going to try and clean up using bacteria.

Cleaning up oil using bacteria might sound kind  of ridiculous, but it's not.

Just hear me out.

After some of the biggest  oil spills in US history,   microbes have been the first to show up.

In April  2010, a crew on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig   was closing up an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico  when a surge of high pressure methane gas shot   up into the drilling rig, where  it exploded and killed 11 workers.

Over the next three months, that well spewed  more than 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools   worth of oil into the ocean.

And as  governments and the oil industry were   trying to deal with the disaster, so  were microbes, specifically bacteria.

Oil is really just a mix of different  hydrocarbons and following the spill,   bacteria started gobbling them up.

By  “gobbling them up” I mean metabolizing   them—gaining energy and releasing  carbon dioxide and water as byproducts.

Bacteria are actually more like us than  you might think.

They also need food,   in this case it’s just chains of hydrocarbons and  not a sandwich.

Most bacteria also need oxygen to   metabolize that food.

Fortunately,  with the Deepwater Horizon spill,   currents in the Gulf of Mexico continued  to bring in oxygen so that the bacteria   could keep metabolizing hydrocarbons.

Some  species of bacteria metabolized smaller   hydrocarbons like ethane while other species broke  down longer hydrocarbon chains, like n-hexadecane.

So let's do this.

Oh, I opened the wrong side.

Okay.

Well that's a lot of bacteria.

Um, I'm going to try and spread it out.

We still got this under control.

Don't worry.

Don't worry.

I'd say there's enough bacteria   in there.

So, uh, now we just have to  wait and see what happens.

Look, look,   look, it's starting to break stuff apart  so you can see all of a sudden that there's   sort of like bubbles popping up.

There's a  lot of movement that I don't think is just   because I dumped a bunch of stuff in there.

I do think that it's because the microbes   are actually becoming active.

So yeah, so  much bacteria in here probably more than I   would've put if I hadn't accidentally dumped  a bunch in, but I'm very interested to see   what they do.

Okay.

Yeah.

This is going  to take a sec.

So while we wait and let   these bacteria do their thing, let's talk about  some other cool stuff that they can clean up.

There are a lot of researchers looking at not  only how bacteria can turn hazardous stuff into   stuff that's less terrible for us, but how they  can remove it from the environment altogether.

One example of something bacteria can  /remove/ is URANIUM—yes, the radioactive   element used to power nuclear reactors and  was used to create the atomic bomb.

The   US actually has a lot of uranium-contaminated  aquifers and soil left over from the Cold War.

So some bacterial species use uranium to  gain energy.

So if you've studied cellular   respiration you might remember that metabolizing  food generates a bunch of electrons.

Those   electrons need to go somewhere for the process to  continue.

For us, the electrons get dumped onto   oxygen when we breathe.

In the case of these  bacteria, they dump the electrons on uranium.

More recently, researchers also figured  out that these bacteria can soak up uranium   using lipopolysaccharide chains.

These are  lipid, or fat, molecules linked to strands   of sugar molecules anchored on the outer  membrane of the cell, and it turns out   that a particular form of lipopolysaccharide  soaks up uranium like a sponge.

The cell then   forms something called a vesicle, where the  membrane with the lipopolysaccharide layer   starts to close in on itself, creating  what kinda looks like a soap bubble.

So the uranium stays trapped, pulled out  of the environment, and the bacteria coats   itself with new lipopolysaccharides  to start that process all over again.

And, as it turns out, metabolizing oil  and cleaning up radioactive elements   are really just the tip of the  iceberg for what microbes can do.

There’s a chemical called perchloroethylene, or  PCE, which is generally used as a cleaning product   for things like fabrics but also cars—to  remove grease from brakes, for example.

It can get into our drinking water, where it  has been linked to different types of cancers.

There are bacteria that can actually  remove chlorine atoms from PCE   and its breakdown products leaving  behind way less toxic compounds,   like ethene.

The challenge is getting huge amounts  of these bacteria to sites that need PCE cleanup.

In researching all of this, what  I found especially cool was that   bacteria that clean up waste like crude  oil or PCE or uranium do it on their own.

They haven’t been genetically modified, they’ve  just evolved in ways that allow them to do this.

Some researchers are engineering common bacteria,   like E. coli, to remove waste like mercury,  but genetic tinkering isn’t always needed.

I mean, after the Deepwater Horizon  spill, scientists were ready to bring   in genetically modified bacteria to help  gobble up hydrocarbons, but the bacteria   in the Gulf were already hard at work and, over  the following days and months the contamination   selected for bacteria that could not only survive  but thrive under those extreme conditions.

I want to make it clear that bacteria are  helpful but they aren't a free pass for us   to do things that will destroy our planet.

Plus  it’s not like they magically clean up everything.

Okay.

Let's see what we've got.

Even though  the experimental looks a little bit crazy   it's because the bacteria are  coded in clay and stored that way.

So it has this kind of weird film on it, but I  can tell that there are less big globs of oil   in this one compared to this one.

So, although  I don't see a massive difference between these,   I do think that the bacteria did help  break apart.

Some of the oil in this one,   you know, if I was going to really help them out,  I would have done something to air rate the water.

So similar to what the Gulf of Mexico did for the  deep water horizon spill, bringing in that oxygen   to help the microbes do their thing.

So, you  know, pretty solid experiment and really just   makes me excited to see what people might  be able to do with bacteria in the future.