Bioremediation Scaleup Effectiveness: A Review

Bioremediation has been applied in laboratory-scale testing to simulate field-scale bioremediation applications. The simulations have focused on the development of concentration-time profile data in the laboratory to be modeled and used for predicting field-scale performance, particularly the time of treatment and the treatment concentration endpoints. This review reports on more than a dozen examples of bioremediation where both the laboratory-scale and field-scale data are provided. These data have been analyzed to examine how well the laboratory-scale kinetics predict the kinetics at field scale. In most cases, the laboratory-scale kinetics exceed field-scale kinetics and underpredict the time of treatment to a given endpoint in excess of 100% and by as much as 11,900%. In some cases, the laboratory-scale kinetic rate constants fall between ±100% of the field-scale kinetics, leading to predictions within 50 to 200% of the time of treatment to a given concentration level. Not enough examples nor details within the references exist to permit a detailed explanation of why these differences exist. However, several hypotheses are given in this review as to why scaleup is often problematic, and comments from other investigators on this topic are presented.