I hope this guy gets in on the oil spill clean up/remediation work. Sec. Chu knows him as does BP -

[pinto]

Much of his pioneering work in microbial bioremediation has been done at the 40's / 50's Hanford plutonium production site - chromium waste clean up - as well as oil sludge sites, among other projects. And he's well known to the players across the board in this situation. ~ pinto

The Science of Green Microbes

Terry Hazen finds, studies and then uses microbes to clean up pollution deep underground, to refine oil before it is pumped and to produce the next generation of green fuels. He catches alligators sometimes, too.

By Bijal Trivedi



In 1995, the DOE sent Hazen to spearhead the cleanup of an abandoned oil refinery in southern Poland where oil had been dumped in open ponds for more than a century, forming what Hazen called a “sludge lagoon.” He showed that cleaning up such sites could be done quickly, to a high standard, just by providing the right mix of air and food to indigenous microbes, which cleaned up the oil-soaked dirt by doing what comes naturally. The project showcased the DOE’s expertise and served as the training ground for bioremediation teams all over Europe. “I don’t believe in doing the most expensive and the most cool, that sort of thing, unless it is practical,” he adds.

When met with an environmental disaster, Hazen doesn’t get emotional. He doesn’t rant about the extent of the disaster or the impact on the wildlife. Often, he admits, his first impulse is to get a sample. That’s exactly what he did when he saw the old sludge lagoon.

<snip>

In 1998, Hazen was lured to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a renowned center for biotechnology research. There, he now runs an empire with many projects and hundreds of collaborators; he leads the ecology department, the environmental biotechnology center and the microbial communities department of the Joint BioEnergy Institute, to name just a few of his efforts. All of his projects are somehow tied to remediation.

While an adamant environmentalist, Hazen is unapologetic about working both ends of the energy equation, using microbes not just for cleanup, but to improve oil extraction and refining, and to produce biofuels. “We can’t say, ‘Oh we don’t want to work on oil because of greenhouse gas and all this crap,’” Hazen says softly but with a tinge of impatience. “We’re going to need oil and some of those products anyway. So why not change it to something that is less toxic to the environment?”

Hazen says that he knew all along that microbes could be used for in situ oil refining. But, he says, “Until we hit this energy crisis here recently, nobody was interested in it.” When oil prices spiked, interest grew; in 2007, the University of California, Berkeley, received $500 million from BP to set up the Energy Biosciences Institute. Before becoming Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, tapped Hazen to lead the search for oil-refining microbes.

“Terry was an easy choice to run the Microbially Enhanced Hydrocarbon Recovery program because he is both an excellent scientist and a strong manager,” Chu said in e-mail interview. “He has been a leader in microbial environmental biology and ecology, and the results of his research now being applied in the bioremediation of many contaminated sites.”

<much more at>

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/the-science-of-green-microbes-11438/