Oil Spills and Farming

I worked in the Bering Sea area of Alaska when the Exxon Valdez incident occurred. It was 1989. At the time, it caught the attention of the world. Oil contamination, marine life, wildlife, and affected villages graced the headlines. What a tragic mess. People rushed to help.

In 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill took place off the coast of Louisiana. For 89 days, everyone whose livelihood depended on the oil and fishing industries in the Gulf region was on hold. Money, technology, and chemical solutions were all engaged to stop the “bleeding” and restore health and vitality to the ocean waters.

The waters in Alaska and the Gulf have returned to “normal,” but few know the real reason or the “heroes” that helped.

Nor do we understand that a disaster is quietly taking place on the land side of our country. Remember the Great Depression from the 1930s? The Dust Bowl? A severe drought caused massive crop failures and dust storms cited as one of the worst man-made environmental disasters our county has ever faced.

After moving from Alaska to Colorado, I learned of what I now know as the “heroes” of the oil spill disasters. I began experimenting with them in the oil fields and have been studying them ever since. They are the quiet, tireless “workers” who “eat” up the oil, clean the oceans, and clean contaminated soils and chemically hardened surfaces.

Let me introduce you to the world of Indigenous Beneficial Microbiology. They are the clean-up crew that can’t stop eating once they get started. They are inexpensive yet very effective. They love all things pollution.

I have shifted my focus from oil cleanup to how to restore damaged soil using microbiology. At first, it was about helping plants survive and thrive in less-than-ideal conditions. But I now understand that these microbes can do much more than that. Remember the Dust Bowl I mentioned?

Most of us aren’t aware, but we lose part of our “country” daily. Our country is the soil that grows crops and pastures and feeds for dairy and animals, fruit trees, and everything food-related.

Calcification, chemical buildup, and drought are endangering our land's lifeblood. We have become so focused on producing larger and faster outcomes that we have overlooked conservation, resting, health, and balance. We have made it more expensive to grow organic than chemically treated foods.

Too often, it takes environmental catastrophes to get our attention. My goal is to introduce hope, but I need first to expose the precarious position we have reached with our land.

Most of you reading this may only have your backyard and a few acres. You want to work the land, grow your gardens, feed your families, and maybe make a living selling at farmer’s markets. This blog is for you. It’s not too late. There are good options. You can redeem your soil. It may be too wet or too dry or have too much clay. Whatever the case, there are inexpensive yet very effective microbes waiting to get to work for you.

Let’s go back to the oil spills I mentioned in the beginning. I need to break down the scale of the events, the circumstances, and how the restoration occurred.

As significant and far-reaching as these catastrophes were, they didn’t overwhelm these natural biological engines. They have an enormous latent capacity geared to expand to the depths of the dilemma exponentially. The microbiology saved the day.

I had some modest experience with oil contamination in the ocean in the Aleutian Islands in the late 80s and 90s. I was in the Aleutians when the Exxon Valdez hit the rocks outside Valdez, Alaska, and dumped 11 million gallons into Prince William Sound.

As a local politician in the fishing town of Dutch Harbor, Alaska state officials kept us in the loop. Dutch Harbor served an extensive fishing fleet seasonally throughout the year. This fleet fished everything from herring in southeast Alaska to Unalakleet north of Nome. Our chances of getting hit directly by an oil slick were slim.

Our oil spill dilemmas were limited to fishing boats and freighters hitting the rocks on remote shorelines along the Aleutian chain. These were home to bird rookeries and shoreline wildlife like seals, sea lions, and sea otters. Boats that couldn't be pulled off the rocks were blown up by putting dynamite in the fuel tanks. Oil booms and sorbent pads managed small boat oil spills.

When the Exxon Valdez cleanup effort began, there needed to be a deeper understanding of how to employ restoration efforts. Eleven thousand people were put to work cleaning 1300 miles of affected shoreline. Oil was corralled, skimmed, burnt, and dispersed using chemical dispersants.

State agencies kept us updated on the clean-up efforts with weekly phone calls. Based on these updates, we prepared our port and harbor response to environmental disasters of some scale.

The remediation of the Exxon Valdez oil spill continued for several years. Because that spill was close to shore, a storm a few days after the wreck pushed much of the oil onto beaches. Bio-remediation was a vital feature of the effort. They attempted to remove the oil by physically washing beachheads with power washers and stimulating the indigenous microbes with Nitrogen fertilizer. It was the critical feature that enabled the state of Alaska to consider the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleaned up in September 1992.

However, the real key to the cleanup was the microbes. Here is a quote from an article: “Although numerous physical means were used to remove or disperse the oil, ultimately, it was the microbes that played the major role in mitigating the environmental impacts of these two worst oil spills in US history.”

Oil biodegradation and bioremediation: a tale of the two worst spills in U.S. history

On April 20th, 2010, the British Petroleum well, Macondo, in the Gulf of Mexico, was sheared because of a platform failure. It pushed a hundred and 50 million gallons of raw crude into the Gulf of Mexico.

I was working with some partners with bacterial solutions for contaminated soils and oil-contaminated water around Hobbs, New Mexico. I left and drove to the Gulf. In the middle of June, I was in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

The oil spill itself was 80 miles offshore in the middle of the Gulf. My hope was in "being there" on the ground. 

While having lunch one day, I watched a couple of microbiologists on TV proclaim that once the oil well was plugged, the indigenous microbiology in the Gulf would quickly clean it up.

In my experience in testing beneficial bacteria against small samplings of contaminants, it had always performed well. But the Gulf of Mexico is not small. Almost 100,000 square miles of oil contaminants were on the surface and in the water column. Once there, you could feel the gravity of the circumstances. The Well spewed enormous amounts of oil daily into the Gulf. The whole focus was on getting that well shut down. Nothing else mattered. I quickly realized that any remediation opportunities were way down the road, and I returned to New Mexico.

Scientific surveys later proved that the unseen microbes were primarily responsible for the disappearance of the spilled oil. The oil leak was capped on July 15th. By the first week of August, no surface oil slick was observed, and concentrations of detectable oil in the water column greatly diminished.

So, in both of these oil spill catastrophes, the indigenous bacteria did the cleanup and restoration.

A political cry from both sides can be encapsulated with the refrain, "We are losing our country." From an agricultural standpoint, the phrase is very accurate. The country we are losing is our topsoil.

With environmental disasters in mind, soil erosion is happening enormously. It is 17 times faster than we can replace lost topsoil. The salvation moment to the catastrophe unfolding is again microbial diversity. Synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides of every stripe, and many of our farming methods have stripped the soil of its sustainable qualities.

Climate awareness, organic processes and procedures, carbon sequestration, and sustainable farming techniques must be addressed. Are they helping or hurting?

The advances in biotechnology since the Exxon Valdez have been significant. The essence of microbes when they are effective is that they do all the work. Microbiologists have been able to reconfigure the consortia of bacteria to do very specific work.

They also know now that over 400,000 barrels of crude oil seep up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico every year. But, the array of microbes readily convert this oil into carbon dioxide and water.

Have we been abusing our soil all these years by not understanding this?

To give better context to this story, let me share another story of the attempt to clean the Gulf spill.

At approximately the same time I was in Louisiana looking for an opportunity to remediate some soil, Kevin Costner (yes, the actor) made an innovative product pitch for machines designed to be first responder tools for cleaning oil spills. He hoped these units would function like most first responder situations with the appropriate machines operated by experienced technicians familiar with emergency situational dynamics. By the time the machines arrived on the scene, oil had accumulated for 60 days at various states of viscosity, from thin to thick oil. 

 In the BP Deepwater Horizon situation, the machines were designed but not built. By the time they were engaged, much of the surface oil had weathered and was thick. In a first responder situation, the oil would be fresh, more liquid, and more effectively separated, fulfilling a real immediate need. The indigenous microbiology in the ocean would still be static, unaware of a new food source of spilled crude oil.

The 87 days of oil flowing freely from a healthy 5000 feet down created a circumstance for the microbiology to adapt and feed on the various hydrocarbon elements from the simple to the complex. By the time the Well was capped, and the oil stopped flowing, the indigenous micro bacteria had exponentially expanded throughout the entire acreage where oil was present, both in the column and on the surface. The microbacteria had time to adapt and grow to the scale of the circumstances. 

In an ideal situation, one could envision well-vetted machines in front of, or on the path of, the most vulnerable natural habitats. Since the Exxon Valdez and the BP Deepwater Horizon, an enormous scientific and logistical body of testing and reenactment scenarios have taken place, understanding the role of mechanical solutions to complement the natural processes that work together to heal these disasters.

Yet, the record shows that from July 15th, when the Well was shut down, until the first week of August, most of the oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico had disappeared. The natural biological engines of nature had found a food source and converted all that oil into essentially carbon dioxide and water in three weeks.

I’m not faulting Mr. Costner or his inventions. We do need technology like this that works for oil spill disasters.

But to me, the big picture takeaway is that tens of thousands of square miles of oil surface pollution were gone in three weeks.

Not one person was hired to do the work; invoices were never sent to British Petroleum or the government; it was just nature at its finest healing a great wound in the ocean.

Our product offerings follow the same themes. We use natural biological processes to save time, energy, and money. The microbes do the work, providing you with larger, healthier, organic produce from beautiful, robust plants grown in healthy bio-diverse soil.