Reply #1: Here are your answers

[izquierdista]

1) Yes, it does work. It's not a cure all for all situations, but when done right, it works.
2) The bacteria is a natural part of the ecosystem, and your "artificially grown" is a red herring. What is artificial is the amount of bacteria food that is currently being dumped on the ecosystem. The first thing that can eat it (the bacteria) are going to have a feast and multiply like crazy, naturally occurring or inoculated from somebody's culture.
3) Yes. Once their food source is gone, they will be eaten by protozoans and microscopic animals, and those numbers will spike and so on and so on up the food chain.

There is no need to "wait a couple of weeks"; the people developing this technology are in the same situation as Kevin Costner's brother -- they have been carefully working on their idea for years, and now the situation that they were preparing for has arrived big time. This oil spill is a big laboratory and every scientist and engineer who has been squirreled away should be invited to demonstrate what he can do. In a short time, what works best will become apparent and more resources can be added to that effort at the expense of those that don't.

If you understood the EPA's process for getting products put on the National Contingency Plan Product Schedule, you would see that it is a Catch-22 of "first you have to demonstrate the product, but this disaster for which we have no solutions is no place to demonstrate your product". Regulation works well when you have an established process and want everyone to stick to the rules. A bioremediation of unprecedented scale does not fall into that category and you have to rely on human judgment instead of a set of rules. As far as whose judgment, I would trust the scientists who have been studying the problem over people who want to pray for deliverance from the oil or administrators with a law background.

P.S. I doubt it is "home-grown" bacteria. How many people keep a 30,000 gallon bioreactor in their home?