Experimental linkage issues of petroleum site bioremediation

Bioremediation of petroleum-contaminated sites is expected to be a cost-effective remediation technology. However, many potential users of the technology expect the reliability of this technology to be similar to other candidate technologies for widespread consideration. In particular, candidate technologies should possess the property of reliable experimental linkage — there should be reasonable confidence that experiments done at one scale can be reliably related to another. An important example is bench-scale treatability studies that should result in linkages with commercial-scale operations. In this respect comparison of bioremediation to other candidate technologies reveals that bioremediation is in an early stage of its evolution. It is being pursued at a variety of sites and scales with practitioners from a variety of disciplines. Integration of activities between disciplines and an ability to quantitatively compare results at different sites and scales is proceeding. This paper addresses a number of physical, chemical, biological, analytical, and statistical issues regarding the successful comparison of results between experiments.